Kathy Landvogt

Having developed my visual art practice alongside a career in social justice, I now make sculpture and contemporary textiles to give material form to overlooked realities. The repetitive actions of handling fibre connect me with the female heritage of manual textile work, while the material and the process itself guide the work, with content and form evolving together through an intuitive, haptic dialogue. I love taking on new challenges by collaborating with other artists and using traditional textile techniques in novel ways, simultaneously stretching my material knowledge and peeling back my own historically situated experience.

Motherlode, 2024
This work emerged from learning how mitochondrial DNA has carried our matrilineal legacies down through uncounted generations. Inspired by the intricate microscopic forms where this DNA nestles, as well as its powerful symbolism, I have woven a large matrix of wire netting and organic forms to hold these ideas. Modern human memory has lost ways to stretch that far into the past, but wire itself has memory, and stands in for the names, faces and stories of a female family tree lost to time.

The Salpinx Collection, 2021-2023
Salpinx: a trumpet-shaped tube, another term for Fallopian tube. Here my subject is the female reproductive organs, re-imagined, and the hidden ‘women’s troubles’ they hold. Combining lacy knitting with the resistance and toughness of wire mirrors the tensions and contradictions of female experience.

Athena, 2020
The discoveries of knitting wire carried me along, stitch by stitch, through the long 2020 lockdowns. I love the contradictions of copper wire: pliable yet strong, a metal that can be woven into lace and holds memory. The looped patterns suggest a rose window, a curtain, a shroud, a veil, even armour. Together they create a strong female presence, the goddess Athena, to bring the gifts of strategy, wisdom, and weaving.

Fugitive, 2023
‘Fugitive’ is a frottage print (rubbing) of my wire weaving ‘Athena’. An outline of my own body is fused with patterns left by the knitted and looped wire. The paper’s fragility shows marks of each handling as well as the memory of the original artwork. Within the layers left by this process are questions about what is gained by protection versus risk, and by the ritual of making itself.

Symbiosis, 2023
I use the qualities of wire and textile techniques to convey meaning, including inherent contradictions. Knitting, shaping and layering fine-gauged coloured wire creates a delicate fabric that nonetheless retains its metallic nature. In ‘Symbiosis’ these dual qualities of fragility and strength express a close but ambiguous relationship between two entwined and unfolding forms.