About

Katie McGroarty (she/her) is a Scottish artist originally from West Dunbartonshire, now based in Dundee. McGroarty is an intermedialist artist, who has exhibited internationally, currently exploring oils and ready-made domestic pieces. McGroarty’s work is currently stocked with the Hard Boiled Gallery, based in Dundee.

McGroarty achieved her BA(hons) in Intermedia at the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh in 2020, and went on to achieve her MFA in Arts and Humanities in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee in 2022.

Since her MFA graduation she has stayed in Dundee, working with the Dundee Art Society (2022-2024) and Generator Projects (2023-2024). During her time in Dundee, Katie founded the Dundee Artists Database, a free to use database of artists in Dundee, born out of a resentment of nepotism in the city. Since the autumn of 2025, Katie has been on the board of directors of her hometown’s Clifftop Projects, a charity which brings free and accessible art supplies and free art workshops to the young people of West Dunbartonshire.

McGroarty’s work is autocartographic and primarily looks at Scottishness, intersections of class and gender, and the contexts of intra-christian sectarianism in Scottish domestic, material and visual culture. These themes feature heavily in her undergraduate dissertation The Effect of the Stereotype on Contemporary Scottish Visual Culture (2020) where Caledonian antisyzygy, the Scottish kailyard and Scottish miserabilism are central themes. This can be seen in her 2022 MFA Degree show Can’t See the Woodchip for The Trees and in her accompanying masters thesis Towards a Morphology of Devotional Materialism (2022).

McGroarty's work typically features ready-mades and centers objecthood- she often makes work regarding devotional materiality and the unspoken idiosyncrasies and social boundaries of the domestic space. When not using ready mades, McGroarty works within the realms of pseudo-trash aesthetics, experimental drawing, installation and most recently has revisited oil painting. McGroarty's immaterial work centres heavily around non-hierachal grass-roots community work as seen in her resume.