Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Katie Mcluckie
My practice explores the unstable boundaries of the body, positioning it as something fragmented, fragile, and in constant flux. Working with soft textile forms, crochet techniques, and sculptural installations, I investigate the abject body — a body that resists containment, blurring the lines between inside and outside, self and other.
The process of crocheting and wrapping fabric becomes a way of building and unbuilding the body simultaneously. These repetitive, care-driven actions speak to the labour of holding together something that is always threatening to fall apart. Threads unravel, forms sag, and padded structures swell outward, suggesting a body in the process of undoing itself. The materials evoke flesh, organs, and bodily excess — what should remain hidden beneath the skin is brought to the surface, creating a tension between attraction and repulsion.
My ideas are an ongoing conversation and manifestation of the impermanence of both the material and of life. Whilst stuffing, sewing and staining fleshy coloured nylons, the process feels surgical. The wrapping and threading of wires and crocheting wool is a precise yet expressive procedure. Influenced by our bodies, I am fascinated by the tactile memory embedded in materials, how touch and texture can evoke emotions and memories, creating a deeply personal connection with the viewer. I intentionally leave traces of the handmade in my work, allowing imperfections to speak to the fragility and imperfection inherent in life itself.
By creating large-scale, immersive environments, I invite the viewer to navigate a space that feels both familiar and alien, bodily and architectural, comforting and disturbing. In doing so, I aim to challenge perceptions of the body as a contained, ordered system, instead presenting it as something that is constantly shifting, leaking, unraveling, and reforming.
The unravelling body speaks to wider themes of vulnerability and transformation — a body that is always in motion, always on the edge of collapse, yet never fully undone. By allowing the body to seep into its environment — stretching from the wall to the floor and into the surrounding space — I explore how the self is never entirely contained, but always entangled with the world around it.
Projects
The Unravelling Body
This body of work is titled The Unraveling Body, it is an exploration of impermanence, the internal body, and abjection. The work engages with ideas of the abject as articulated by Julia Kristeva — the breaking down of bodily borders and the discomfort that arises when what is meant to be inside the body becomes external. In her work, she argues that the abject is what is rejected or cast aside from the body, such as bodily fluids, decay, and other forms of impurity, which disturb the boundaries between the self and the other.
In Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva introduces the concept of abjection as a psychological and cultural reaction to things that disturb our sense of self, identity, and societal order. The abject is not simply what is disgusting—it is something once part of us or intimately familiar, now rejected or cast off in order to maintain a sense of personal or social boundaries.
The abject challenges the body’s integrity and forces us to confront the unclean or disruptive elements of human existence. It exists at the margins of what is socially acceptable and is often tied to the uncontrollable aspects of human existence, such as illness, death, or bodily functions; it is these undesirable aspects of human existence in which I found inspiration for this work.
