Patrick Costello is an artist whose work comes alive through multispecies collaborative relationships, integrating practices of ecological horticulture, sculpture, printmaking, and community performance to create ephemeral spaces for transformation.
Costello has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, and Stone Quarry Hill Art Park. He has performed in venues including Ars Nova, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Public Theater, and at intentional communities, squats, and underground venues around the world.
While at MacDowell, he began work on a project about queer artists throughout history who have designed and cultivated gardens. As spaces of cultural inheritance and botanical wonder, gardens reflect a value of community care while also illustrating their cultivator’s political, social, and economic positions. Compiling research from primary source documents, Costello will create an archive – complete with an outdoor installation faithfully recreating a series of artist-gardens – in order to generate conversation about inheritance, landscape, and caretaking across generations. Toward the end of his residency, Costello worked with other fellows to bury himself in MacDowell’s compost heap.
