Power Play, 2026.
Lace, mixed textiles, PVC pipework
Works
Cycle, 2026
Washing machine, acrylic mirror, sound.
60 cm x 60 cm x 80cm
Cycle is a kinetic and performance-based installation centred on a machine caught in relentless repetition, continuing to perform even as it splutters, strains and appears close to failure. The work reflects on learned endurance and the pressure to remain controlled, productive and composed long after the point at which something has started to give way.
Power Play, 2026
PVC pipework, mixed textiles
3 m x 2 m x 2 m
Power Play takes the visual language of militarism and recasts it through femininity, softness and excess. A tank covered in pink lace becomes both absurd and confrontational: an object associated with force and domination transformed without surrendering its power. The work plays with the expectation that femininity should be decorative, contained or non-threatening, turning those same qualities into a means of occupying space unapologetically.
Rinse, Repeat, 2026
Soap, acrylic mirror
50 cm x 50 cm x 12 cm
Rinse, Repeat is a chain created by a sequence of carved soap links, bringing domestic labour, repetition and restraint into the same object. The work reflects on how acts of cleaning and care are learned almost invisibly through observation and repetition, passed from one generation to the next until they become instinctive. By turning soap into a chain, the piece links maintenance with obligation, suggesting how inherited forms of labour can become so normalised that they are difficult to recognise as work at all.
Compact, 2025
Steel, acrylic, mixed textiles
40 cm x 40 cm x 19cm
Compact transforms a familiar beauty object into a trap, bringing self-improvement and self-surveillance into direct contact with threat. Its polished, desirable surface masks a mechanism designed to snap shut, reflecting the pressure to continually correct, refine and optimise the self. The work considers the point at which beauty and care stop being choices and begin to feel like forms of discipline and obligation.
Artist Statement
Katie Parker is a British sculptor and installation artist whose work explores power, control, desire and freedom, questioning how power presents itself and how it shapes the choices we believe are our own.
Her sculptures transform familiar objects and structures into something simultaneously inviting and unsettling. Military machinery is dressed in delicate lace, domestic spaces become places of confinement, and objects associated with comfort, beauty and intimacy take on unexpected weight or authority. Through changes in material, scale and context, Parker challenges how we recognise power, revealing how authority can appear fragile, while things associated with protection or pleasure can exercise control.
Working with familiar, often feminine-coded forms and materials, she investigates how desire is constructed, how behaviour is shaped, and why we willingly participate in systems that constrain us. Her work considers control not simply as something imposed through force, but as something sustained through aspiration, repetition, pleasure and the promise of belonging.
Often seductive, playful or absurd at first encounter, her sculptures gradually reveal more uncomfortable questions about complicity, dependence and freedom. At the centre of her practice is a recurring question: how much of what we want have we really chosen?