Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Drawing, Installation
Kathryn Spence was born in 1963 in Stuttgart, Germany. She earned a BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1986 and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland in 1993. She has lived and worked in San Francisco for most of her career.
Spence spent eighteen years showing with Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco before that gallery closed, and her work has since been presented by P.Bibeau in New York. Her sculptures and installations entered the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young), the Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among others.
Spence has received an Artadia Award (2002), the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2005), a Eureka Fellowship, and a Fleishhacker Foundation Award, and in 2015 she held a Lucas Artists Fellowship residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga. Her solo exhibitions include the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City (1999), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (2001), the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland (2010), and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut (2012).
Spence builds sculptures of birds, owls, foxes, rabbits, and other wildlife almost entirely out of discarded materials: street trash, worn clothing, stuffed-animal fur, mud, string, wire, rubber bands, and scraps of paper and fabric gathered from gutters and alleys. An avid birder and naturalist, she works from close observation of specific species, meticulously sorting and reassembling cast-off material into creatures rendered with startling anatomical exactitude.
The resulting work sits deliberately between the “dirty” origins of its materials and the “clean” space of the museum gallery, staging a quiet collision between the natural world and a culture of consumption and waste. Spence’s practice is also one of restraint: rather than introducing new objects into the world, she works only with what has already been discarded, turning accumulation and obsessive organization into a form of ecological attention.
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