Exhibition review: Quiver at Lakeside Arts

MccGwire’s work is almost entirely constructed with feathers, painstakingly sorted, cleaned, and arranged by hand. In the first room of the exhibition, sculptures of crow, pheasant, rooster and pigeon feathers ripple like the surface of water, coil in serpentine knots and spout from the walls. The effect is as slippery and double-sided as the shifting light on iridescent plumage; startlingly compelling and delicate, yet charged with what the catalogue accurately describes as a ‘vital animal presence’. 

The room beyond, glimpsed first through an open archway, contains the writhing shape of GYRE, two trunk-like feathered coils protruding from the wall and intertwining across the space. In the last room, smaller pieces are contained – as if artefacts in a taxidermy collection – inside bell jars and extruding frames. Many have the hypnotic delicacy of spiders’ threads.

MccGwire credits her upbringing in the Norfolk Broads as a distinct influence on her work’s themes; the imagery of serpentine waterways, wildlife and, notably, natural cycles of life and decay, are pervasive.

Visceral and alive, the pieces evoke intense bodily and emotional reactions. They deliberately occupy an uncanny space between the animal, primal and more-than-human world. Though ethically sourced, the feathers making up the artworks seem to contain forceful echoes of the live bodies they came from, made yet more potent by these bodies' physical absence from the exhibition space. TORSION – recurring as an important motif throughout the exhibition – takes the knotted and coiled appearance of serpentine form, twisting in and out of itself. It reminds the viewer of amorphous life forms and sinuous muscle, yet glistens with iridescent greens and blues. The sculptures metamorphose from one being to another, not quite bird, neither snake, but perhaps something more supernatural – the natural beyond what we know, see, and expect.

Many of MccGwire's works, particularly the spiralling arrangements of feathers in the first room, are reminiscent of the land art movement beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike those works, these are removed from the outdoor settings they typically engaged with, and playfully adapted into a contained exhibition space. By bringing them into the human realm, MccGwire’s adaptation draws out their subtle tensions: between power and submission, the human realm and the nonhuman.

The exhibition plays on aesthetics of the sublime; that which is outside our understanding and therefore something we fear. Like the almost-violently protruding coils of GYRE, many of the pieces feel confrontational. Some of the smaller pieces in the third room mimic animal hides hung on butchers’ walls - from real, gleaming blades - with a hypnotic macabre. 

MccGwire has an instinctive grasp for that latent power which lies beyond the human and is intertwined in this underbelly of the natural world. But she doesn't exercise this for the sole purpose of discomfort; rather, to encourage the viewer to question what it is exactly about our relationship with this world that makes us uncomfortable.

Without losing gracefulness, Quiver offers us glimpses into a natural world often ignored in favour of its prettier surface. Quiver reminds us that this world is insubordinate, uncontainable, larger than we are; it is this reality that stimulates the discomfort MccGwire brings to the fore. The exhibition is macabre at points, but also strikingly beautiful as it encourages us to take a closer and more honest look at nature. Quiver draws us closer to nature’s underbelly, beyond what we usually encounter, in its own twisting, powerful way.

See Quiver in Djanogly Gallery at Lakeside Arts Centre until Sunday 4 January 2026.

lakesidearts.org.uk