Corvid

A vast, serpentine sculpture formed of over 20,000 crows’ feathers, Kate MccGwire’s Corvid snakes across the gallery floor with dark, muscular emotive power, seemingly endless in its fluidity. ‘This sculpture is a writhing form’, the artist says. ‘It is sort of clenching itself like you would see an eel or a snake ball. I sort of think of this work as being a manifestation of a state of mind, slightly angsty, smothered – it’s lots of things mixed together’. The direct appeal of Corvid is undeniable, its glossy feathered surface as tactile as it is unnerving. MccGwire, who works on a studio barge on the Thames, was inspired to use feathers by the moulting pigeons in the derelict warehouse near her mooring. It wasn’t her first use of avian material: her Royal College of Art degree show piece Brood, a mesmeric spiral formed of 22,000 chicken wishbones fixed to the wall, was purchased by Saatchi in 2002, and shown alongside such iconic works as Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living in the 2004 show ‘Galleon and Other Stories’.