Kirsten Batten-Leach: Catalyst Carrier

A.I.R. Gallery presents Catalyst Carrier, an exhibition by 2025-2026 A.I.R. Fellow Kirsten Batten-Leach. This is Batten-Leach’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

Catalyst Carrier uses durational material forms such as oxidation, corrosion, and extracellular digestion to describe the interactions between bodies in care environments. Cumulative processes such as cultivating rust and mold require careful attention to relationships between materials that develop over time. Like the choreography of tasks that constitutes a relation of care, this matrix of interactions wears away at assumed notions of independence and agency that undergird the hypercompetitiveness of neoliberal capitalism. With careful consideration of forms such as moldy bread or cast-off metal, Batten-Leach shifts the registers through which we approach ideas of value and dependence.

Artworks in Catalyst Carrier reflect the physical and emotional signs of wear experienced by people in a carework environment. Batten-Leach cultivates rust, using oxidized steel and copper to treat canvas fabric. The distressed textile is then cut into pieces and sewn into an amorphous, three-dimensional sprawl of crevices. These successive interventions dissolve binaries of surface and substrate, subject and object, care giver and recipient. The resulting new hybrid forms suggest that we, too, might change and be changed in turn by the relational structures that we occupy and perform. In a graphite sculpture, small pieces of discarded metal (slag) hover at the sculpture’s appendages, threatening to spill into the empty cavity at its base. The invisible, compulsive force of magnets encased within the sculpture’s body lifts and adheres the slag in place, as if asking, what is holding and what is being held?

Batten-Leach grounds the exhibition in her experiences working as a caregiver within both her own family and informal labor economies. Often precarious and performed by Black, brown, and queer femmes, carework is a marginalized form of labor that is nonetheless essential to forming more equitable social structures. When infrastructure collapses, we turn to all we have: each other.

Caretaking obligates us to enact new ways of being and relating to each other. Sometimes, getting dressed in the morning requires the collaboration of multiple people skilled at giving and receiving emotional cues and communicating outside of symbolic language. Acts of care are not predicated on what a person can or cannot do, the speed at which they do it, or how much of it they can do. Echoing academic Akemi Nishida, Batten-Leach instead asks, what might an ecosystem look like, in which individuals are valued for the diverse ways they exist, in all the tired, emotional, and energized states that pass through them?

Kirsten Batten-Leach is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures and performances about care-taking and bodily autonomy. She creates a record of these durational works in the form of painting and drawing. Her background as a former ballet dancer and domestic worker informs the physical rigor of her object-making practice. Both experiences are two polarized forms of labor which make visible some aspects of extreme social stratification that are present in the United States.

She is currently a 2025-26 A.I.R. Gallery Fellow and was shortlisted for the Smack Mellon Residency Program. She has exhibited works at NYU Gallatin Galleries, The Factory (Long Island City) and Black Brick Project. Raised in Boston, MA she completed her MFA in Integrated Practices at Pratt Institute and earned a BFA in English Literature from Mount Holyoke College.