Art in America spoke with Catherine Telford Keogh, who explains how she conglomerates trash and landfill into striking sculptures.
“Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay,” Keogh explained during the recent studio visit. “ In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand.”
AiA visited Keogh’s studio for our New Talent issue. She is one of five New York–based artists to watch featured in our new studio visit video series.
Read an edited version of their conversation here: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/catherine-telford-keogh-interview-1234669288/
Art in America: https://www.artnews.com/c/art-in-america/
Credits:
Featuring Catherine Telford Keogh
Special Thanks to Helena Anrather Gallery
Director: Christopher Garcia Valle
DP: Jasdeep Kang
Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle
Interviewer: Emily Watlington
Foreign Telford Keo and we are in my studio in Sunset Park and I am a sculptor slash interdisciplinary artist my work more generally always comes back to the body and intimacy with the world around us and that kind of brought me to Catherine youssef’s work Catherine Youssef said about fossils is that when
We are confronted by fossils we like in an embodied way it brings the body back into deep time because we will also become fossilized and so she talks about this idea of re-mineralizing the human and the ways in which that might recalibrate our relations to land if we
Start thinking about our our like material connections to land and like Earth and time and so that’s kind of what drew me to her work originally so there is a series that I’m working on right now of repurposed countertops that are or like countertops or fireplaces I’m interested in trying to position
What is like present or like a product that is recognizable that’s from now to and like juxtapose that with this more kind of this like deep geologic time that also is like a tile for a bang I’m looking at her like sample perfumes and uh free samples that you get from like
Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s and like samples that my mom has collected over time I’m embedding those samples within the different stone countertops or off Cuts they’re all off cuts from various projects like one was a bathroom sign the the Onyx pieces from a fireplace that was too small and so it was just
Going to be thrown out so I’m you know in all of my work I’m really interested in this idea of like life cycles of stuff but also how that relates to like the body aging and changing um you know the ways in which I’m object
Kind of does that too and and now things are designed for obsolescence so you know for the most part everything kind of ends up in the waste stream or like on the ground so I’m interested in that and like positioning that question within the context of this deeper geologic time
Video Catherine Telford Keogh on Sculpting with Landfill was uploaded on 06/14/2023 by Art in America Youtube channel.