About
The morphology of devotional materialism takes many forms for many different reasons, it has to survive. This installation accompanies my Master's thesis ‘Towards a Morphology of Devotional Materialism’. This materialism is defined as being not fully sacred or domestic, able to personify both but never solely one.
My installation looks at the four stages defined as the main elements of this morphology: procurement, accumulation, display and inheritance. These stages encompass the gift economy and can be simultaneously reminiscent of DIY punk aesthetics as well as kitsch cottage-core iconographies. In short, the stages characterise how these objects come to belong to us, why we keep and possibly collect them, how and why we arrange them, and the sociological and often devotional reasons as to why we accept them as inheritances or pass them down ourselves.
My use of ready-made objects is in itself a study of how the benign and ubiquitous can be charged with sociological and venerational energy. Within this scope, my work also seeks to investigate gender expressions, relations and politics through objects and to this end, intraChristian sectarian expressions and interactions channelled through and due to these objects, specifically in Scotland. My written and visual work seeks to bridge the gap between research in Scottishness, sectarianism in Scotland, & gender in Scotland, by encompassing all of the above into one body of work consisting of artistic and academic research.
The morphology of Devotional Materialism
The morphology of devotional materialism takes many forms for many different reasons, it has to survive. This installation accompanies my master's thesis ‘Towards a Morphology of Devotional Materialism’. Devotional Materialism is defined as a category of objects not fully sacred or fully domestic, able to personify both but never solely one - through this shifting categorisation, we arrive at a third space, where the solely devotional lives.
My installation looks at the four stages defined as the main elements of this morphology: procurement, accumulation, display and inheritance. These stages encompass the gift economy and can be simultaneously reminiscent of DIY punk aesthetics as well as kitsch cottage-core iconographies. In short, the stages characterise how these objects come to belong to us, why we keep and possibly collect them, how and why we arrange them, and the sociological and often devotional reasons as to why we accept them as inheritances or pass them down ourselves.
My use of ready-made objects is in itself a study of how the benign and ubiquitous can be charged with sociological and venerational energy, making use of Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory alongside Jane Bennett’s works on Vibrant Matter. Within this scope, my work also seeks to investigate gender expressions, relations and politics through objects and to this end, intraChristian sectarian expressions and interactions channelled through and due to these objects, specifically in Scotland. My written and visual work seeks to bridge the gap between research in Scottishness, sectarianism in Scotland, and gender in Scotland, by encompassing all of the above into one body of work consisting of artistic and academic research. My work focuses on the relationships of Catholic people who are or were socialised as female and the objects experiencing this morphology.
For the application of this morphology to an installation space, I concentrated on collecting ready-made objects and prioritised giving the application of wallpaper a movement and aliveness. Bubbles, creases and gapping were used in the wallpaper to emphasise the everyday nature of these objects and delineate the installation from the pristine white space of the studios, as well as activate the alivity of the piece as mentioned above. My previous work underscored the importance of identity politics particularly with reference to personhood and lived experience through inclusion of evidence of human touch or care such as handwriting, spontaneous marks made with body parts or even references to personal memories.
Within this piece, I eliminated any trace of humanness from the piece such as fingerprints or hand markings, as within the morphology of devotional materialism one is not a person but an object - devoid of humanness, used as a pawn to further this morphology. To that end, the morphology of devotional materialism is fundamentally sustained by consuming the consumer, within this functionality, the viewer becomes the object: any interaction with the devotional object activates its morphology and thus the consumer becomes the consumed. In a small but crucial detail, the change in wallpapers is not only representative of how this morphology is willing to change and grow in order to survive, but its change builds a trap around you. With raised wood chip on one side and embossed on the other, a jaw has grown around you without alerting you. The benign becomes the being, and the consumer becomes the consumed.
Kaitlin McGroarty (she/her) is an intermedialist artist from the Greater Glasgow and Clyde region of Scotland. Having graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh with a BA (Hons) in Intermedia in 2020, she went on to work with organisations prioritising working class creatives and grassroots organisations such as Alt D, RIG Arts and Clifftop Projects. Her work typically involves elements of class, gender, religion, hierarchies and power structures. Visually, McGroarty’s work is rooted in trash aesthetics, typically engineered to repurpose or temporarily recontextualise everyday ready-made objects, usually with the intentionality to subvert or challenge pre-existing gendered or classed contexts.