PARIS.- Born in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Kate Newby lives and works in South Texas. For more than twenty years, she has developed a practice that pushes the boundaries of sculpture and blurs the lines between object, architecture, and landscape. Rather than simply occupying a site, her works alter how a place is understood and experienced, taking part in the very experience of inhabiting it.

Can’t find water presents a body of recent works by Kate Newby. Following on from her bronze air vents installed at the gallery entrance in 2022, the new sculptures occupy the exhibition space in all its dimensions. New glass windows cut into the walls bring light into previously enclosed spaces, while ceramic forms extend across the walls and from floor to ceiling. Together with suspended glass works, they work their way into the building’s very masonry, altering the architecture itself.

Working with a limited range of materials - clay, bronze, glass, and plant fibre - Kate Newby explores their possibilities and limitations. Clay is pressed, walked on, and fired; glass carries weight and transmits light; rope holds tension. The materials travel through the gallery’s stripped-back space, changing in texture and form, unfolding and echoing one another in a subtle play of colour, light, opacity, and transparency. Together, they form a constellation with neither centre nor hierarchy.

This movement is also found on the surfaces of the sculptures, which retain the traces of the artist’s gestures: imprints of her hands, fingers, thighs, or shins - impressions of a body physically engaged in the act of creation, whose weight and movement actively determine the forms that emerge.

The whole exhibition is traversed by currents that shift with our gaze and our movements, within an open arrangement that refuses stillness. The spaces between sculptures, the architecture, and the movement of visitors become part of the work. Colour, light, gravity, and tension create relationships that change as we move through the gallery. What initially appears to belong to the building reveals itself as sculpture, while the sculptures themselves unsettle the distinction between what belongs to the architecture and what has been added to it.

—Ida Simon-Raynaud