Caitlin McCormack, Origin Story

My work acknowledges a trans-generational craft practice and externalizes experiences with self-harm, body dysmorphia, and assault, resulting in a taxonomy of emotive vessels. Exploring queerness, isolation, and environmentalism through an uncanny, occasionally humorous lens, I contemplate societal reluctance to legitimize gendered craft and regard crochet as a behavioral response to apocalyptic conditions. I'm inspired by folkloric totems and relics, medieval botanical motifs, institutional osteological displays, sci-fi, and body horror cinema. Each object is an unraveling artifact of a memory or fixation, tethered to a surface and made viewable from a distance.

I crochet antique thread, dredge it in glues and foraged pigments, and fashion it into sculptural forms. The string carries its own history as it is often sourced from familial inheritances, estate sales, flea markets, and neglected stoop piles. The transformative act of generating and stiffening each hand-wrought component into a static composition recontextualizes moments of despair and rage as ornate, provocative, comical specimens. The distinction between the viewer and the object is reinforced by notions of fabrication versus reality, gravitas versus absurdity, and animation versus death.

Caitlin McCormack is a Philadelphia-based fiber artist and educator who has participated in solo and group exhibitions at Elijah Wheat Showroom, The Mütter Museum, Museum Rijswijk, Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, The Taubman Museum of Art, Hashimoto Contemporary, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Feinkünst Krüger, Rhodes Contemporary, Field Projects, MoCA Westport, Future Fair, Paradigm Gallery, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC. Their work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Juxtapoz, Hyperallergic, Smithsonian, The Guardian, Whitehot Magazine, Fiber Art Now, and Bust Magazine, and their sculptures were the subject of an interview with Jim Cotter for “Articulate" on PBS. In addition to holding teaching positions at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and Hussian College of Art and Design, they have completed artist residencies at ChaNorth (NY), The Peter Bullough Foundation (VA), The Wassaic Project (NY), and Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (NY). McCormack received a Joseph Robert Foundation grant in 2021 and was awarded the Woodmere Museum’s Maurice Freed Memorial Prize in 2023.