Katie Holten is currently exploring the potentials for redefining what we understand by ‘nature’ in contemporary visual arts. She developed a unique visual language that incorporates media appropriate to the situation at hand, such as drawing, installation, temporary public artworks, sound and living plants. Research in physics, botany, architecture, and urban sociology is fundamental to her practice. She creates works that contribute to an awareness of place and environment and reflects the vulnerabilities implicit in everyday life.

Katie’s new work, which she developed especially for the Van Horn space, stems from her current Fulbright research. She has filled Van Horn with an artificial tree constructed from modest materials; cardboard, wire, tape, and paper. Two drawings, which developed from her examination of different trees, are part of the exhibition. The idea of dense vegetation, while at once drawing on contemporary anxieties about the denaturalisation of the natural world, exposes the new cult of artificial nature, and also alludes to threatening landscapes in literature and old German Folk Tales. Yet, behind the desire for the paradisical, the beautiful, and the magic of fairy-tales, the dark and the eerie are as present as the insight that Utopias are doomed to failure. On a more subtle level Katie‘s works explore the discontinuity between ideals and realities.

Katie Holten *1975 in Dublin, lives currently in New York City where she is undertaking a Fulbright Scholarship. She has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums. Amongst others at Creative Time, NY; ICA, London; the 1st Prague Biennale; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam. In 2003 she represented Ireland on the Venice Biennale. In 2005 she received an Pollock Krasner Foundation award.

Exhibited works:

The Black Tree, 2005
wood, cardboard, wire, black gaffer tape

an unnatural beauty, 2005
ink on paper
76 x 56 cm, in frame

Untitled (24 trees), 2005
ink on paper
76 x 56 cm, in frame