Caitlin Devoy

Born 1976 in London, lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington

Caitlin Devoy's work transforms familiar objects, instruments, kitchen tools, furniture, the debris of making, into intimate, uncanny sculptures suspended between states: stillness and motion, presence and absence, the sacred and the absurd. Devoy's practice embraces the transgressive power of the comedic as both honey and sting, using humour to reveal the power relations encoded in everyday objects and in the gallery space itself. Her material choices, wax, rubber, resin, silkworm gut, embalming resins, imbue the work with bodily characteristics, evoking preservation, ritual and the trace left behind by something just gone.

Casting sits at the centre of her process, not only as technique but as a form of deep attention. Devoy casts from undersides, spillages and residues, the overlooked, unseen parts of an object or a body, giving form to what usually goes unnoticed: the scent left behind, the shape of something just passed, the breath after sound.