Cathy Wilkes

Often examining personal experiences, including motherhood, Wilkes is best known for vulnerable, haunting sculptures and installations in which sculpted and found objects are altered and arranged into humanistic—if sometimes disturbing—domestic scenes. This work earned her a nomination for the 2008 Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for contemporary art. Her more recent paintings explore similar themes through roughly hewn, colorful abstraction. The canvases live long lives in the studio as they are worked on, set aside, often scrubbed and worked on again—part of the same ongoing labor that goes into her sculptures, a constant arrangement and accumulation of material.