KAY WHITNEY


Writing about my work? It’s an act of translation that involves converting the visual to the verbal, bringing in a spectrum of acts and memories and an accumulation of things I’ve seen read, seen, experienced.
A short list of these incorporates the space inside Grand Central Terminal; the Brooklyn Bridge; the experience of New York’s Metropolitan Museum; climbing trees; welding; the texture of my dog’s coat, a trip to Rome in my teens – it’s all in my work, in the details. What stands out is the fabrication, the construction, the accumulation of histories - an amalgam, an uncertain chemistry.

My interest in architecture includes the yurt, the tipi and I.M. Pei’s glass house, Alvar Alto’s TWA terminal, Corbu’s Villa Savoie. I make work that considers the DNA of Modernism, the work of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and feminism. I build metaphorical sculptures and contraptions, fragments of memory palaces, flashes of humor and moments of intense speculation. My work is larded with formal concerns but I’m also pushing the work into marginal territories that court the clumsy and ugly; I’m both abusing and re-inventing craft, hoping for beauty.