Kate Egan
Kate Egan was born in Manchester and spent her childhood in Vancouver & Mexico. After studying at Manchester School of Art, MMU, she has worked simultaneously as a practitioner and lecturer for the past thirty years. Kate teaches on the BA(Hons) Textiles in Practice programme and is curator for the Vertical gallery at MMU. Focussing on wellbeing through visual art; Kate’s research interests are at the intersection of interactive e-textiles, art for public space and collaborative practice. She completed a major commission for the Bridgewater International Concert Hall in Manchester in 1996 and was presented to HRH Queen Elizabeth II. For a detailled CV follow this link. ‘Colour in Space’ is an interactive homage to crowds and sensory overload, where embroidered digital textiles layered with lights and sounds allow a viewer to pause and ponder on the possibilities of being momentarily transported to another place. The everyday physical is re-interpreted via the interactive textile interface, scrambling and filtering information brought into the view of a webcam. Any observer as captured on camera, therefore, projects their own colour and movement onto the work: this could be through their own bodily movements, the use of some object or information from their mobile phone screen. For the ‘OOP’ exhibition footage TV adverts were fed into the webcam and the interface was allowed to re-interpret these adverts whilst scrambling the original colour, light and rhythmic information.
