Kate Holcomb Hale

Portrait





Kate Holcomb Hale (b. 1976, Buffalo, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in greater Boston, MA. Kate creates installations and architectural interventions highlighting how objects and our built environment reflect the presence or absence of care. Collapsing soft, kitchen tables, resting architectural columns and clay fragments of home act as vehicles to consider vulnerability and the invisible labor of caregiving that occurs within the domestic and public spheres. Kate received her MFA in critical theory and studio art from Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine. She has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including exhibitions at The Danforth Art Museum (Framingham, MA), Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK), Praise Shadows Art Gallery (Boston, MA), LaiSun Keane Gallery (Boston, MA), Spilt Milk Gallery (Edinburgh Scotland), and the ICA (Portland ME). Kate’s artwork has been featured in The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review and will be featured in the forthcoming books, Mother Art Prize 4th Edition and Empathetic Engagements. She recently attended the Jenny Family Residency in New Edinburgh, Nova Scotia.













"Holcomb Hale’s paper clay impressions of pieces of her home – door hinges, wainscotting – feel like snatches of a dream. Fueled by the drive to capture space, time and memory, her massive, lumbering slipcovers of her family dining table, collapsing upon itself, brings questions of the weight of domesticity and the labor involved in keeping things appearing upright. Precipitated by the responsibility to sell her family home following the death of her father, Holcomb Hale’s new work questions the lifespan of an object and reflects on the ways we place emotional and relational signifiers onto the invisible and overlooked.”




*images courtesy Carlie Febo Photography (above) 

& Joyelle West Photography (left)