Lost Tribe

Visual Art by Kate MacDowell

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Kate MacDowell’s hand-built porcelain sculptures respond to environmental threats and their consequences, revealing the rifts and frictions between man and nature. Based out of Portland, Oregon, her work has been shown throughout the US, Japan and Europe and at Scope Miami and New York, ArtAmsterdam, ArtHamptons, Art London, London Art Fair, Showoff Paris, Art Paris, Solo Project Basel, NEXT and Art Chicago fairs. She was recently an artist in residence at the Kohler Arts and Industry Program and will have work in group exhibits at JMKAC (Wisconsin), and MAD (NY) this year. Her work has been published in SKULL STYLE: Skulls in Contemporary Art and Design (NY), Doppelganger: Images of the Human Being (Berlin), Dark Inspiration: grotesque illustrations, art and design (Hong Kong), The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Hi-Fructose, American Style, American Craft, O.K. Periodicals (NL), Creative Review and Rooms (UK), BANGart (Italy), and Quotation: Worldwide Creative Journal, (Japan) among others. Her work was featured on the CD and single cover art for Erasure’s album, “Tomorrow's World” designed by Tom Hingston .

The Cost Rican golden toad was a small, shiny toad that was once abundant in a small region of high-altitude cloud-covered tropical forests. Herpetologist Jay Savage first spotted the toads in 1966. As of May 1989, a mere generation later, not a single golden toad was to be found. The International Union for Conservation of Nature now classifies it as an extinct species. Although very little is known about the toad, it is believed to have spent the majority of its life underground. During its mating season, a few weeks in April after the dry season had ended, males gathered in large numbers near puddles and waited for the females. The males competed for opportunities to mate until the end of their mating season, after which the toads retreated to their burrows. In Lost Tribe, a host of black slip-cast toads hauntingly surrounds just a few bright-orange males. In her photography, MacDowell repopulates and reimagines what a rain forest environment might look like with these toads reinstated. The artificiality of the process—shot in an Oregon temperate rain forest with ceramic objects made in an industrial factory setting—shows how extinct ecosystems can be evoked, but the effort remains an imperfect attempt to re-create what is forever lost.