About

Katie McGroarty (she/her) is a Scottish artist based in Dundee, but originally from West Dunbartonshire. McGroarty achieved her BA(hons) in Intermedia at the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2020, and went on to achieve her MFA in Arts and Humanities in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in 2022. Since her MFA graduation she has stayed in Dundee, working with the Dundee Art Society (2022-2024) and Generator Projects (2023-currently).

McGroarty’s work is autocartographic and primarily looks at Scottishness, intersections of class and gender, and how all three interact with intra-christian sectarianism in Scottish domestic, material and visual culture. These themes feature heavily in her undergraduate dissertation The Effect of the Stereotype on Contemporary Scottish Visual Culture (2020) where Caledonian antisyzygy, the Scottish kailyard and Scottish miserabilism are central themes. McGroarty's work typically features ready mades and Object Oriented Ontology- she often makes work regarding devotional materiality and the unspoken idiosyncrasies and social boundaries of the domestic space.This can be seen in her 2022 MFA Degree show Can’t See the Woodchip for The Trees and her accompanying masters thesis Towards a Morphology of Devotional Materialism (2022) can be found on Google Scholar, ResearchGate and Academia. When not using ready mades, McGroarty works within the realms of pseudo-trash aesthetics, experimental drawing, installation and most recently has revisited painting. McGroarty's immaterial work centres heavily around non-hierachal grass-roots community work as seen in her resume.