Kate McMillan

Never at Sea is a film, sound, performance, and sculptural intervention, which explores forced migration and the climate crisis.

Two years in the making, Never at Sea is a collaboration with Kate McMillan ( London-based artist and Senior Lecturer, CMCI, KCL), world-renowned experimental composer Cat Hope, contemporary choreographer Sivan Rubinstein and the Refugee Council’s Lewisham Refugee Resettlement Project.

Never at Sea responds to the history and location of St Mary le Strand church as a site where grief, loss and transcendence is contained within the rituals of religious beliefs. The exhibition, performances, talk and symposium extend the purpose of the space to encapsulate secular experiences of erosion and loss, focusing on the grief of forced migration and climate change.

Never at Sea is a nuanced project which provides an alternative to the culture wars by engendering experiences of empathy and abstraction. It reminds us that the narratives of loss and journey are not political, but timeless stories that have been embedded within cultural life for thousands of years.

Three scheduled performances include percussionist Louise Devenish who will bring the voices of McMillan’s sculptures to life; vocalist Marcia Lemke-Kern and contemporary dancer Lydia Walker. An essay on the work by Dr Kate Pickering will be available on request.

EVENT INFO

Opening time: 22 – 27 June 2023, 10am-6pm daily

Location: St Mary le Strand Church, Strand, London WC2R 1ES (outside the entrance to Somerset House)

• Private View (free but ticketed).
  Wednesday 21 June, 6.00-8.30pm. Performance 7.00-7.45pm
• Performance (ticketed £5): Thursday 22 June 6.30-8.00pm
• Artist Talk (free but ticketed): Saturday 24 June 3.00-4.00pm
• Symposium (free but ticketed): Monday 26 June 11.00-5.00pm
  Including speakers such as Dryden Goodwin’s Breathe project ArtRefuge and more.

Book here

SUPPORTED BY

The project has been supported by the Refugee Council, King’s Sanctuary Programme, King’s Culture, King’s College London, AHRC, Science Gallery London, St Mary le Strand Church, Sir Zelman School of Music and Performance, Monash University, and the Australian Research Council.

BIOGRAPHIES/ABOUT

Kate McMillan is an artist based in London and Senior Lecturer in Creative Practice at King’s College, London. She works across media including film, sound, installation, sculpture, and performance. Her work addresses the role of art in attending to impacts of the Anthropocene, lost and systemically forgotten histories of women, and the residue of colonial violence in the present.

McMillan’s work has been featured in various museums and biennales, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney; the Trafco Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Perth Institute for Contemporary Art; John Curtin Gallery, Perth; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Previous solo exhibitions include ‘The Lost Girl, Arcade Gallery, London (2020); ‘The Past is Singing in our Teeth’ presented at Kunstquartier Bethanian in Berlin, December 2017, which, in 2018, toured to the Civic Room in Glasgow and Arusha Gallery for the Edinburgh Arts Festival. Other solo exhibitions include ‘Instructions for Another Future’ 2018 Moore Contemporary, Australia; ‘Songs for Dancing, Songs for Dying’, 2016, Castor Projects, London; ‘The Potter’s Field’, 2014, ACME Project Space, London; ‘Anxious Objects’, Moana Project Space, Australia; ‘The Moment of Disappearance’, 2014, Performance Space, Sydney; ‘In the shadow of the past, this world knots tight’, 2013 Venn Gallery.

Her work was part of ‘All that the Rain Promises and More’ curated by Aimme Parrott for the 2019 Edinburgh Arts Festival. In March 2018 McMillan presented new work for Adventious Encounters curated by Huma Kubakci at the former Whiteley’s Department store in West London. In June 2018 she produced a new film-based installation for RohKunstbau XXIV festival at the Schloss Lieberose in Brandenburg curated by Mark Gisbourne. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Celeste Prize curated by Fatos Üstek. In 2016 she was invited to undertake a residency in St Petersburg as part of the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) where she developed new film works which were shown at the State Museum of Peter & Paul Fortress in Russia in 2017. In early 2017 she was selected to be in the permanent collection at The Ned, for Vault 100, a new Soho House project which reversed the gender ratio of the FTSE 100 by showing the work of 93 women and 7 men. In 2016 McMillan took part in ‘Acentered: Reterritorised Network of European and Chinese Moving Image’ during Art Basel Hong Kong, curated by Videotage.

Her work is held in private collections around the world, as well as in the Christoph Merian Collection, Basel; Soho House Collection, London; The Ned 100, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Wesfarmers Arts Collection; KPMG; Murdoch University, Australia; University of Western Australia and Curtin University, Australia. Since 2002 she has also undertaken residencies in London, Tokyo, Basel, Berlin, Sydney, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

Cat Hope is a composer, performer, songwriter, noise artist and researcher. She is a flautist, experimental bassist and director of Decibel: a group focused on Australian repertoire, the nexus of electronic and acoustic instruments and animated score realisations, which led to her being awarded the the APRA|AMC Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011 and 2014. Her first opera ‘Speechless’ premiered at the 2019 Perth Festival and won ‘Best Dramatic Work’ in the 2020 awards, and her major orchestral commission from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will premiere in 2022 at the Tectonics Festival, Glasgow. She has been composer in residence at the Peggy Glanville Hicks Composers House in Sydney, Australia, as well as a Civitella Ranieri, Visby International Centre for Composers and Churchill Fellow. Her work has been discussed in books such as Hidden Alliances (Schimmana, 2019), Sonic Writing (Magnusson, 2019), Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as The Wire, Limelight, Realtime, Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft and Gramophone, who called her “one of Australia’s most exciting and individual creative voices.” Her work has been recorded for Australian, German and Austrian national radio, and her 2017 monograph CD on Swiss label HatHut won the German Record Critics prize that year.  An advocate for Australian music and gender diversity, she is also the co-author of Digital Art – An Introduction to New Media (Bloomsbury) and Professor of Music at Monash University.

Sivan Rubinstein is a London based choreographer whose art uncovers contemporary cultural issues and aims to facilitate creative public conversations. Her work is deeply rooted in collaboration with academics, artists, communities and methods of alternative learning. Her practice navigates between finding beauty in the personal, intimate experience of moving and highlighting its wider social meaning. She sees choreography as a platform to inquire, and creates space for her audience, collaborators, and people she meets to reflect and engage. Sivan is also the co-founder of OH Creative Space with Jessica Miller, and co-curated Oops festival with The Swallowsfeet Collective (2015-2019). She was chosen as the UK artist for Pivot Dance commissioned by Creative Europe, selected by The Place for the “Exit Visa” programme, and given the title of “Exceptional Artist” by the Israeli Ministry of Culture.  Sivan is currently creating a new series of work Dance No 2°, exploring climate futures through embodied experience and young people’s perspective, the generation Z. This new series is co-produced and commissioned by The Place.

See also: Never At Sea.