Zachary Mcgowan

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ARTIST CATALOGUE

Corpus Apparatus

Corpus Apparatus emerged from my personal investigation into the unstable boundaries between body, identity, and environment. The work extends my long-standing engagement with the tension between interiority and form, the sense of the body as both an instrument and a limitation. My experiences have shaped a perspective that views the body less as an intrinsic aspect of identity and more as a vehicle through which traversal, perception, and selfhood are negotiated. This has led me to approach embodiment not as a fixed truth but as a site of mediation: a shifting interface between the internal and external, the mechanical and organic. As a non-binary individual, I have often found my own body somewhat detached from myself, has often rendered my body unfamiliar; something proximate yet distant, a vessel I navigate rather than inhabit. 

This notion is intrinsic to my body of work, wherein these forms resist containment within inherited structures of gender or a wider taxonomy, aligning with the instability that underpins the work itself. The refusal of singular classification: whether of gender, body, or material emphasises the multiplicity of the self and the body it inhabits, where identity and embodiment are continuously rearticulated through performance, gesture, and form. The sculptural forms that constitute Corpus Apparatus operate within this ambiguity. They resist categorical definition, merging human, animal, and artificial elements to suggest figures that exist somewhere between recognition and estrangement. Each work occupies a liminal space, both corporeal and constructed, evoking a sense of uneasy familiarity. 

These forms act not as representations of the body but as propositions for how it might be otherwise: fragmented, hybrid, and perpetually unresolved. Materially, the series explores how transformation and endurance coexist. Steel, ceramic, and wood are chosen for their contradictory natures. These materials are both rigid and pliable, strong and sensitive to change. Through processes of welding, carving, and firing, the materials become collaborators rather than subjects of manipulation. Their responses, the bending of metal, the cracking of clay, the warping of wood, speak to an ongoing dialogue between human intention and material agency. The resulting surfaces bear the evidence of this exchange, their irregularities functioning as inscriptions of process rather than imperfections to be concealed. The figures’ faces operate as thresholds: they invite recognition while refusing total familiarity. Their presence encourages the viewer to engage affectively, yet what is encountered is never entirely human. In this tension lies a reflection on the complexities of relation, on how empathy and distance, intimacy and otherness, often coexist. The body, in this reading, becomes a negotiation, an evolving system rather than a coherent form.

Corpus Apparatus stands as both a culmination and a continuation of my exploration into these ideas. It proposes an understanding of the body not as a closed, stable entity, but as an apparatus, an amalgam of processes, materials, and relations that remain in flux. These sculptures exist as meditations on fluidity, instability, and a persisting transformation.