Shona Kitchen is an internationally recognized artist, designer and educator based in Providence, Rhode Island. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art (London) with a MFA in Architecture, she has divided her time between creative practice and teaching. Since 2014, Kitchen has been Department Head at Rhode Island School of Design in the graduate program Digital + Media (Kitchen is currently on sabbatical).
Her work spans a range of outputs from public art, conceptual narrative proposals, book works, exhibitions, and interactive sculpture/installation. Her practice is frequently collaborative, research based and site-specific.
Using digital, analog, and biological elements, Kitchen’s work provides ground for physical and virtual, natural and artificial, and real and imagined to playfully coexist. Throughout her practice, she explores the psychological, social, and environmental consequences of technological advancement and failure. Her projects often function as imagined propositions, or as alternate histories that reveal and subvert the unseen technologies that make up the fabric of everyday life. Her vision is distinctly Ballardian and darkly comic.
At times technologies are doubled back on themselves in absurd gestures that suggest ways in which the natural and technological worlds might exist symbiotically. In other instances, Kitchen creates alternate infrastructures by training ubiquitous technologies onto the alien terrain of wilderness. Within these absurd micro environments, she explores our complicated relationship with the world around us, exposing our shifting role as creators, consumers, and at times unwitting victims of technology.
By situating her projects in the public realm, Kitchen encourages repeat encounters. Her pieces function as portals between the viewer and her techno-poetic alternate universes. Whether creating a surveillance system for a school of fish, or a tidal monitoring sign for a creek-bed, Kitchen’s work provocatively critiques our relationship with the typically siloed natural and technological worlds by speculating what could be.
Learn more about Shona by clicking here
