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KATE McMILLAN
Kate McMillan (b.1974 in Hampshire, UK. Lived in Perth, Australia from 1982-2012. Lives and works in London, UK.)
Kate McMillan (b.1974, Hampshire, UK), lived in Perth, Australia from 1982-2012, relocating to London in 2013. McMillan’s work incorporates a range of media including sculpture, film, sound, installation, textiles and performance. She is interested in the linking narratives of forgetting and place, often focusing on the residue of the past. McMillan’s artworks thus act as haunting memory-triggers for histories and ideas that are over-looked.
McMillan has resided on the Board of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) based in Sydney. She earned her Phd at Curtin University, Perth, examining the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island in Western Australia. In addition to her practice as an artist, she is currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Art in the Department for Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College, London. In this role, she convenes the arts-based research for two Master’s programs and is also the Development Lead for a new BA in Culture, Media and Creative Industries which will be launched in September 2020. Prior to this, she has guest lectured at The Ruskin, Oxford University, University of the Arts, Farnham and Coventry University and in Australia at Curtin University. Her recent academic monograph was published by Palgrave Macmillan in September 2019, titled ‘Contemporary Art & Unforgetting in colonial landscapes: Islands of Empire’which explores the role of arts-led research by female artists in the global south in troubling accounts of history and decolonising knowledge. Other research includes the 2019 and 2020 author of the Freelands Foundation, Representation of Female Artists in Britain.
Through McMillan’s practice as an artist, her work has been featured in various museums and biennales, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafo Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Perth Institute for Contemporary Art; John Curtin Gallery, Perth; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney.
Previous solo exhibitions include ‘The Past is Singing in our Teeth’ presented at MOMENTUM in 2017, which, in 2018, toured to the Civic Room in Glasgow and Arusha Gallery for the Edinburgh Arts Festival. Other solo exhibitions include ‘Instructions for Another Future’ 2018 Moore Contemporary, Australia; ‘Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dying’, 2016, Castor Projects, London; ‘The Potter’s Field’, 2014, ACME Project Space, London; ‘Anxious Objects’, Moana Project Space, Australia; ‘The Moment of Disappearance’, 2014, Performance Space, Sydney; ‘In the shadow of the past, this world knots tight’, 2013 Venn Gallery; Paradise Falls, 2012, Venn Gallery; ‘Lost’ at the John Curtin Gallery in 2008, ‘Broken Ground’ in 2006 at Margaret Moore Contemporary Art and ‘Disaster Narratives’ at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival.
Her work was part of ‘All that the Rain Promises and More’ curated by Aimme Parrott for the 2019 Edinburgh Arts Festival. In March 2018 McMillan presented new work for Adventious Encounters curated by Huma Kubakci at the former Whiteley’s Department store in West London. In June 2018 she produced a new film based installation for RohKunstbau XXIV festival at the Schloss Lieberose in Brandenburg curated by Mark Gisbourne. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Celeste Prize curated by Fatos Üstek. In 2016 she was invited to undertake a residency in St Petersburg as part of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) where she developed new film works which were shown at the State Museum of Peter & Paul Fortress in Russia in 2017. In early 2017 she was selected to be in the permanent collection at The Ned, for Vault 100, a new Soho House project which reversed the gender ratio of the FTSE 100 by showing the work of 93 women and 7 men. In 2016 McMillan took part in ‘Acentered: Reterritorised Network of European and Chinese Moving Image’ during Art Basel Hong Kong, curated by Videotage.
McMillan’s work is held in private collections around the world, as well as in the Christoph Merian Collection, Basel; Soho House Collection, London; The Ned 100, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Wesfarmers Arts Collection; KPMG; Murdoch University, Australia; University of Western Australia and Curtin University, Australia; and the MOMENTUM Collection.
PARADISE FALLS I
2011, Video, 2 min 49 sec
Sound: composed by Dr Cat Hope, performed by Decibel, recorded by Stuart James at Soundfield Studio
Camera: Luc Renaud; Editing: Sohan Ariel Hayes
Woman on the lake: Eveline Bouvla
Paradise Falls I & II form part of the body of work covering a range of specific landscapes including Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, the Black Forest in Germany and the winter landscapes of Switzerland. With a focus on island sites and places that exist in isolation, the works attempt to draw parallels between physical landscapes and the psychological landscapes of the artist’s own memories, broader cultural histories and stories. These works are the philosophical culmination of the time McMillan spent in Switzerland in 2011 as well as her PhD research into the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, Western Australia. The sound for both films, developed by Cat Hope, is an important aspect of the works provides an un-nerving contrast to the poetic images of the films, highlighting the persistent disquiet of history.
Paradise Falls I was shot in the Black Forest in 2011 during an Artist Residency with the Christoph Merian Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland. The lake
where the work is set, situated on top of an extinct volcano, is called Mummelsee (Mother Lake). There are many myths associated with this lake in German folklore, most notably about a siren who lures men into the forest and kills them. In McMillan’s video, a ghostly female form flickers in and out of view at the edges of of the otherwise still landscape. Setting up an interplay between landscape, memory, forgetting and history, Paradise Falls I considers how history can leave a residue in the landscape and the past often comes back to haunt us.
PARADISE FALLS II
2012, Video, 3 min 28 sec
Sound: composed by Dr. Cat Hope, The Abe Sada Project, recorded by Andrew Ewing
Camera & Editing: Sohan Ariel Hayes
Man in the boat: Aaron Wyatt
Paradise Falls II follows an Aboriginal man as he rows towards the craggy silhouette of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island. He too appears and disappears from sight, finally lost to the inky black of the ocean. The island was the site of an Aboriginal prison that is barely acknowledged in the historical record. The film portrays a man rowing back to his captors, highlighting that history can not always be forgotten. The spectral characters in Paradise Falls I & II are stand-ins for fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas.
The films are like moving paintings, heavily referencing the romantic tradition of Germanic landscape painting. The work of artists such as Arnold Bocklin and Casper David Friedrich become distant cousins to McMillan’s oeuvre. The artist acknowledges and even embraces these quotations but she also holds them in a critical eye as part of an enlightenment ideology that has helped us to forget. Through engaging with the viewing process we participate in a re-remembering, acknowledging the shady edges of things, but also bearing witness to the beauty of sadness that is contrary to the horrors of forgetting history.