Katie Schwab is the recipient of our next MFA Graduate Fellowship. Katie will begin the Fellowship in November 2015 with the opportunity to show her work in the GSS Gallery in Summer 2016.

Schwab is interested in the politics of constructing and inhabiting living space: how the building, designing, furnishing and upkeep of rooms can reveal the values, economies and politics of the people that live there. She is particularly interested in communal living situations, and how an individual voice might be found within the context of a shared living space.

Her work is multi-disciplinary and combines various forms of craft and fine art including video, text, tapestry, embroidery, ceramics and functional furniture embracing both contemporary technological making processes, and traditional craft techniques. Her works are often choreographed together in installations in a ‘communal’ exhibition space. My installations combine objects that embrace both contemporary technological innovation and traditional craft processes (e.g. tapestry- weaving, wood turning).

The work she makes stems from an interest in 19th, 20th and 21st century domestic design and social living space. She is particularly interested in the furniture, architecture and home-ware of communities who believed in the importance, whether social, religious or political, of design and craft in everyday life. Recent work has explored the objects and living spaces of 1960s leftists, the Bauhaus, the Shakers and present day communes.

Katie Schwab received her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015 and has exhibited at the Voidoidarchive, Glasgow; Cookhouse Gallery, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London; Temporary Agency, New York; Airspace Gallery, Stoke-On-Trent; Jerwood Visual Arts Project Space, London; Limazulu, London & Kaus Australis, Rotterdam.

The 2015 selection panel for the award were Louise Briggs, Programme Coordinator, Glasgow Sculpture Studios; Simon Gowing, Curator, SWG3;Rosie O’Grady, Programme Assistant, Glasgow Sculpture Studios; James Rigler, Artist & GSS Studio Holder and Laura Simpson, Programme Manager, Hospitalfields.

The 2015 Fellowship is generously supported by The Craignish Trust.