Brooklyn-based Kate Stone constructs familiar, yet uncanny environments on the threshold between interior and exterior, the real and the supernatural, architecture and the body. A home, in her view, is never entirely comfortable. From overgrown carpets that consume their inhabitants to animated dollhouses that stride on stalactite legs, her work explores the domestic grotesque—a place of psychological contradictions and transformations. On the eve of her exhibition “Doomscroll” at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, we spoke about the material and conceptual concerns behind her installations, sculptures, and animations.
Lauren Levato Coyne: We met about a year and a half ago while you were at Assets for Artists, the residency program at MASS MoCA. Since then, I’ve thought about our shared interests in material exploration, horror movies, and the grotesque. While these themes have continued in your work, your materials have changed a bit. Can you talk about these material shifts?
Kate Stone: My older work is more fiber based. I was thinking about how absorbent carpet is, and I imagined this domestic material absorbing so much dirt, dust, bodily fluid, and emotion that it comes to life and starts to grow. I’m still really interested in that idea, but I got a little burned out on fiber work. After latch-hooking for years, I needed a break from yarn and carpet.
But I’m still thinking about time, accumulation, and overabundance when it comes to domestic space and our bodies. I’ve also been thinking about solidity. I was reading Horror in Architecture, by Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing, which has a chapter about the horror of solidity. I thought there was something funny about that, but it also rang very true to me. For instance, rock formations are strange because they’re so different from us. They’re inert and uninhabitable. But at the same time, we’re all made of the same things. There’s the hard problem of consciousness, but what’s the difference at a molecular level between me and a rock? Nothing. There’s something sort of wonderful and also horrifying about that. So, I’ve been toying with the idea of bodies turning to stone, which obviously has a mythology behind it. I love that petrification is both a fear response and a mineral process. These ideas have led me to play with paper pulp and plaster, which are newer and exciting materials for me. I’m using them to mimic rock textures in my sculptures. The newest work in the exhibition is Dreamhouse, which is like a petrified dollhouse. It has the manmade, which is house above, while the legs are stalactites, like a kind of natural architecture.
LLC: What’s the origin point of the domestic grotesquery in your work?
KS: I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia in an old farmhouse. My friends all thought it was haunted, and no one ever wanted to sleep over. I was always really disappointed—not that they didn’t want to sleep over, but that it wasn’t actually haunted. I liked that they thought it was spooky, and I always wished that I could experience something supernatural. The house did have some strange quirks, though. There were attics that we couldn’t really access, boarded-up doors that didn’t lead anywhere, and a well in the basement. There were even ruins in the backyard. Even though it was my home, and it was familiar to me, I was able to explore, discover things, and create mysteries in my head about this space. I think that’s where my interest in architecture and the supernatural comes from. In a way, my work is imagining or creating the supernatural that I never got to experience.
My interest in the body and the grotesque probably comes from my family. My grandfather was a doctor, and there was an old black and white photo of him in med school hanging in a hallway; he was operating on a cadaver. So, I grew up with a photo of a dead body in the house. We also had slices of lungs affected by cigarette smoke framed on the wall. Stuff like that was just around, and I never really thought of it as strange.
LLC: I’m one of those people who believe everything is a self-portrait. Now, I really see your work as a self-portrait.
KS: I definitely like to think of my sculptures as self-portraits. They’re almost always inspired by my mental headspace, but they start in one place and then end up someplace else. I have a piece in progress right now that’s a sort of rock formation on a staircase. It was conceived as a portrait of anxiety, clinging to the railings of the staircase, neither ascending nor descending, but stuck in place. I started this sculpture when I was experiencing a lot of anxiety, but now I’m in a period of calm. It’s funny to see how the work will change in relation to my mindset.
This in-progress piece also makes the connection between fear and stone. I was researching lithopedion, or stone baby. It’s a rare, very strange phenomenon—image search it at your own risk—in which a fetus forms outside of the uterus, and the body calcifies it. These fetuses are basically rocks with little skeletons embedded in them, and they often stay in the body undetected until there’s an X-ray or something else happens; they have to be surgically removed. I like the idea of calcifying something as an act of self-preservation. I was thinking about how our minds are our own worst enemy when it comes to anxiety, and I imagined calcifying myself as an act of self-defense. Turning to stone is death, but it’s also a fear response and protective mechanism.
LLC: Anxiety formed the concept for “Doomscroll.” Has that anxiety stayed in the work, or is it shifting again?
KS: “Doomscroll” was conceived right around the 2020 election. I’m often working on multiple projects at the same time, and my process is pretty labor-intensive, so it took me about two years to finish everything. At the time, I was doomscrolling a lot, stuck at home like everybody else, and I had this visualization of myself taking in so much bad news that I would spontaneously combust and just go “poof.” That’s how the idea for the sculpture came about, but, of course, it naturally turned into something else. It was initially inspired by spontaneous human combustion, but it also became a cocoon. I was also thinking about petrification at that point, or something more like reverse petrification, with inanimate materials absorbing so much animate material that they come to life. The idea was that this seated figure was doomscrolling and became so paralyzed by anxiety that their environment just took them over and enveloped them.
LLC: It seems like you are working to connect anxiety and the supernatural, a state of mind/physical being with a type of haunting.
KS: I’m really interested in the way that architecture, specifically homes, can reflect the states of our minds and bodies—whether in a literal way, like when you’re stressed and your messy house reflects what’s going on in your brain, or in a more sci-fi way. A lot of famous hauntings were connected to real physical things like carbon monoxide poisoning and low-frequency vibrations. People were experiencing something scientifically explainable but interpreting it as something supernatural. I like that intersection of science and superstition and the idea of bodily ailments being something that can be reflected in one’s home, in architecture.
I’ve always had an interest in the supernatural and the creepy, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I started thinking of it more like fear and anxiety. There was Covid and the political situation, the whole reckoning of wildfires, climate change, Black Lives Matter—everything all at once. We were all stuck in our houses thinking about these horrible things that were happening outside, and I became fascinated by what that does to transform you and your home into something kind of “other.” That’s how anxiety started to creep its way into my work.
LLC: I enjoy how you seamlessly incorporate animation into your works.
KS: Here, there’s a cell phone with hand-animated squares on an endless scroll. I wanted to incorporate animation in some way, and that seemed like the clearest way to illustrate my point. There’s also a sound and light element. The animation on the cell phone emits an 18-hertz tone. It’s a low frequency, one that you feel more than hear, and it’s been tied to experiences of the paranormal. It can induce feelings of dread, of a presence, and even nausea. It’s also the resonant frequency of our eyeballs, according to NASA. They have to test to make sure nothing in their equipment vibrates at that frequency, because it can make people hallucinate.
You can’t experience it fully through the cell phone, it would have to be through intense subwoofers. My dream is to create an installation that could actually do that, but in this case, you only hear a little buzz. It won’t induce these feelings, but I like the idea that it could. So again, this is a scientific explanation for paranormal experiences. The light bulb in the lamp flickers at 40 hertz, which has been studied in mice to reduce brain plaque. I like the idea of these two transformative but opposing tones battling it out. The installation connects social media and anxiety with healing and the otherworldly.
LLC: Aside from politics, what is grotesque to you?
KS: What’s grotesque to me about domestic spaces now has always been grotesque to me. I’ve been living in New York for 13 years, renting and dealing with bad landlords. Over the years, I’ve dealt with many leaks. There’s something about seeping water—and the mold—that I find totally grotesque. But I guess I also love it, because all of my work looks moldy and has to do with seepage in a way. Comedians often joke about really dark things, and they talk about dealing with those things through humor; I feel like I deal with things that gross me out by making art about them.
LLC: What is haunting you now?
KS: This is really personal: I’m six months pregnant, and that’s haunting me. Not in a bad way, of course, but I’m thinking about it constantly. It’s fascinating and weird. It’s kind of like my work—taking the mundane, the things we take for granted, and highlighting what’s grotesque or magical about them. I feel like pregnancy is, in a way, the most mundane thing. People do it all the time, it’s the most natural thing ever, but it’s also total science fiction.
LLC: Talk about a haunted house.
KS: Yes, I’m possessed by another living thing.
“Doomscroll” is on view at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia through September 29, 2024.
