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MULT IP L E T HR E A D S Cross-sensory abstract artist Kathy McTavish makes ‘weird’ sublimely cool. WRITTEN BY ALYSSA FORD | PORTRAIT BY MAGIC BOX PHOTOGRAPHY (DULUTH, MN)
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hen Kathy McTavish was 17 years old, she suddenly quit the cello and dropped out of high school. She had been a serious striver, someone who practiced up to eight hours a day. She had been accepted into an illustrious conservatory in New York, the Manhattan School of Music. But suddenly, four months before graduation, she was done, finished, flamed out. “I was just exhausted,” McTavish says. “And I was completely overwhelmed by the idea of studying music in New York. How would I live there? How would I pay for it?” Instead of becoming a professional cellist, McTavish took a job pouring coffee at Modern Times Cafe in Minneapolis. Later she worked as a roofer, an electrician and then a sign language interpreter. She got her undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She did computer-based ecology research. She taught herself more than a dozen programming languages: Java, SQL, XML, XSLT, HTML, CSS and Javascript, among others. She lived in a couple of off-grid cabins near the Iron Range and powered her computer with solar panels. Then, more than 25 years after she had broken up with her cello, McTavish started getting heat from her circle of friends. One friend threatened to come over to her house and pull the cello out of the closet if she didn’t. McTavish folded to the peer pressure. She found her cello and opened the case. She touched the scroll, the neck, the strings, the tuning pegs. “It was extremely emotional,” McTavish says of reconnecting with her long-abandoned instrument. It was also a turning point, says her friend Val Stoehr, of Afton, who has known McTavish since the early 1980s. “I think finding her cello again was the missing piece. That was the thing she needed to become the artist she’s always been.”
After reuniting with her cello in 2003, McTavish started playing in bars and coffeehouses around Duluth. She provided a beatnik soundtrack for local poets, too, which is how she met her future wife, esteemed Duluth poet Sheila Packa. Then, around 2010, she had an inkling of an idea. She wrote an adaptive software program and then plucked a single cello string. Her computer responded to the rumbly sound with a series of fluid-moving abstract shapes. “It was a revelation,” says McTavish. “It was like I was having a conversation with my computer via sound.” McTavish began to experiment with different kinds of sounds: bells, reeds, spoons scraping on china cups, voices. For as long as she could remember, McTavish had been fascinated by patterns: electrical currents, computer language, musical scores, sound waves. Now she had a mode of expression that spoke to the underlying patterns she saw all around. In 2012, when she was 50 years old, McTavish debuted her first multi-media installation at the Duluth Art Institute, “Birdland.” In 2017, she opened “Chance” at the Tweed Museum of Art. It remains her most ambitious installation to date, with 39 Acer monitors networked with seven projectors in a 900-square-foot space. Students would come into the exhibit, lie down on the provided yoga mats and simply take in the constantly shifting projected shapes and haunting soundtrack. Though McTavish has only claimed the mantle of professional artist for about 15 years, she’s amassed an impressive collection of grants and artist-residencies from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, the American Composers Forum and the Minnesota State Arts Board. “What I love most about Kathy’s work is that it’s an unending conversation,” says Heather Barringer, an experimental percussionist in St. Paul who has collaborated with McTavish. “Everywhere she goes she collects bits of sound. All of her life experiences get threaded into her art. And the discussion just goes on and on.” Sample McTavish’s art at mctavish.work.
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