Katie Holten. Paths of Desire. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2007. mixed media, dimensions variable
Katie Holten, Irish artist, currently in THE MODERNS, an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Writing it up for the Irish Times, Aidan Dunne explains her thus: her work is generally informal and slightly alternative, looking to patterns and connections outside the mainstream. It is, in other words, rhizomatic – in the words of cultural theorists Deleuze and Guattari. Holten’s piece spreads and grows in the manner of a plant species finding a niche and expanding exponentially in a new slice of terrain – as tidy an encapsulation of a rhizomatic practice as ever read. As with plants, some terrains are congenial, some hostile, some roots are hardy, some tender. To be an artist is almost by definition to be hardy.
This video shows something of how and why Paths of Desire, above, was constructed.