Kate Ruck

Kate Ruck (1982, USA) is based in Helsinki, with ongoing ties to New York and Las Vegas, New Mexico, where she spent a decade fabricating and managing production for large-scale sculptural and land-based works before turning to her own practice. She works across sculpture, installation, textiles, and text, often in collaboration. Kate's projects begin from the possibilities of what sits beside a narrative: the companion plant that grows in relation rather than in rows, the footnotes in Anzaldúa's Borderlands running untranslated between English, Spanish, and Nahuatl, or a landscape persisting long after the place has been left. She follows what moves through these things.

At MORPHO, Kate will work on 'Days with No Name', a sculptural research project gathering around figures from Maya cosmology. Wayebʼ are five days outside the 360-day Haabʼ solar calendar, sitting between one year and the next, when the boundary between worlds dissolves and structures ordering time, ritual, and naming release their hold. The Bacabs are ancient deities who survived a great flood and were charged with upholding the sky at the four directions, arms raised at the world's edges. Working in slip-casting, beeswax, and hybrid mold-making, Kate will cast reliefs, solid and load-bearing, open to what that threshold makes possible.

Kate holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki (FI) and a BFA in Video Game Art & Design from the Illinois Institute of Art, Chicago (USA). She was part of the inaugural cohort of the Centre for Nordic Otherwise in Aarhus (DK), and has been an artist-in-residence at Factum Arte in Madrid (ES). Her work has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Kone Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and Culture Moves Europe.