Katharine Dowson
Katharine Dowson
Katharine Dowson studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Art before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, where she was awarded the prestigious 1900 Princess of Wales Scholarship. She has since gained international recognition, exhibiting in London, the United States, Brazil, and Asia. Her work is held in major public and private collections, including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, The Arts Council Collection, Cultura Inglesa Brazil, The Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, and the Science Museum, London. She is also featured in Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s.
In 2014, Dowson was one of 30 international artists commissioned by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for The Art of Saving a Life, celebrating 40 years of global immunisation efforts. In 2015, she became the first artist to exhibit in Oxford University’s Chemistry Department with her solo show Sculpting Science.
More recently, she has been commissioned by museums to create works that accompany major exhibitions, including Spellbound: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft at the Ashmolean Museum and Cancer Revolution: Science, Innovation and Hope at the Science Museum, London—the latter acquiring her installation Silent Stories for its permanent collection.
Dowson’s practice spans the intersections of science, nature, medicine, and art. She has participated in groundbreaking interdisciplinary exhibitions such as Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery, Head On: Art with the Brain in Mind at the Science Museum, and Brains: Mind as Matter at The Wellcome Collection. Her work often emerges from direct collaboration with scientists, translating complex scientific ideas into poetic visual forms.
Glass is central to Dowson’s practice—a living material, she says, that acts as a delicate membrane through which light reveals life’s imperfections. Her sculptures play with transparency and distortion, clarity and obscurity. Using cast glass, lenses, and light, she evokes both the internal and external, the visible and the hidden—bringing memory, perception, and transformation into tangible form.
Katharine Dowson website: www.katharinedowson.com
Katharine Dowson Instagram: www.instagram.com/katharinedowson5