Katrina Moorhead’s drawings, objects, and installations focus on the seemingly ordinary. Whether translating bathroom graffiti into a planted garden or paint chips into a billboard the colors of the sky, the artist often explores artificial representations of nature and approaches each project with a delicate, spare hand that casts the familiar anew.
For her contribution to the recent 51st Venice Biennial Moorhead crafted On or About December 1981 (2005), a pair of iconic gull- wing doors from the short-lived DeLorean car, produced from 1981-83 in Northern Ireland. The artist revived the natural origins of this once-touted symbol of industrial utopianism by draining the car parts of their metallic and mechanical past. Sculpted in bass and plywood, the doors were removed from their adjacent body and lay isolated on the gallery floor like now-broken wings. This minimal work, like Moorhead’s others, is both poetic homage to intricate engineering and a melancholic exploration of the synthetic ways humans experience the natural world.
Born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland in 1971, Katrina Moorhead currently resides in Houston, TX. She received an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, in 1996. Solo shows include Inman Gallery (2006) and Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX (2002, 1998). She has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2005); the 51st Venice Biennial, Italy (2005); and The Vardy Gallery, University of Sunderland, England (2004).