Photo by Alex Santana. Courtesy of the artist. Caitlin McCormack is a fiber artist based in Philadelphia. For over a decade, they have been shaping cotton string by hand into haunting, intricate sculptural forms and installations. Primarily using crochet, McCormack draws inspiration from osteological displays, medieval botanical imagery, cinematic body horror, and science fiction to create works that are personal taxonomies of memory and trauma.
Their portfolio is an uncanny valley inhabited by looming specters and sentient objects that are as likely to crack jokes about existential dread as they are to speak seriously to experiences of isolation, queerness, and loss.
An ongoing experimentation with text and color marks recent work, as does a reimagining of what crochet can communicate about interiors, both domestic and psychological. Lesley Finn Can you speak about the genesis of the pieces in your current show, Conversation Pit , curated by Kat Ryals, and why you chose to represent the objectsβpillows, a phone, shoesβthat you did? That, compounded with being in a relationship that would eventually reveal itself to be falling apart in the house during the pandemic, gave me the feeling that I was tethered to the surfaces in my home, as if when I laid my head on my pillow at night there were strings tying my face to the fabric.
I was placing extraneous meaning on things that people said to me, which led to me generating these statements in the work that feel monolithic. LF The text that appears in those pieces seems to emerge from the objects, like the objects are doing the uttering. CM My sketchbooks are equal parts journal. Things pop into my head; I write them down. LF Looking at the work, it feels possible that these objects have consciousness. CM Jorge Luis Borges has been hugely influential on me, especially his view of language and words as framed in his writing and poetry as a creeping, growing sentient thing.
Speculative fiction bordering on horror and body horror are huge components of what makes me want to make work and what typify my work. A lot of the text on the objects I make is meaty, beefy red rendered in large-gauge cotton string that I sometimes soak in enamel paint until the string becomes unctuous, fluidβa stretchy, unknown substance that could spring from the form and into you.
