The lighter a thought the more it rises is a site responsive installation originally developed in 2018 for the Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, a site that was previously an industrial laundry used for the washing, drying and airing of cloth. In 2019 a new iteration of the work was presented at Toi Moroki Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA), Ōtautahi Christchurch. The exhibition is a provocation for material exploration and deconstructs textiles at its heart; touching on the material’s practical uses, it’s many malleable forms, various woven structures, and it’s delicate weight which is often light enough to be lifted by the breeze. In this exhibition parts are woven together – a net, a grid, a cloth, a scaffold. There are objects that signal, elements that bend, twist and wrap. Great distance is folded into small space through pleats, folds, fittings and weights which allow the textile sculptures to expand and contract with kinetic potential. For CoCA, the exhibition includes a new iteration of ‘the working wall’, a site responsive wall diagram and a gridded working surface intended to mimic a patternmaker’s cutting mat. Presented alongside is a new large-scale steel sculpture that is part scaffold support, part tenter frame - a structure traditionally used to dry milled wool in open outdoor fields. In The lighter a thought the more it rises, the gallery becomes a site for atmospheric notation. Breath, motion and the movement of cloth are traced through single threads of cloth fixed to a sail like ‘tell tales’ that make visible any ebbing and shifts in wind direction. The forms are poised to respond to every change in atmosphere; sensitive, like thought, to each subtle and fleeting shift in the space around them. A limited edition catalogue was produced which includes a long-form essay ‘The Material Choreographies of Kate Scardifield’ by Dr Barbara Garrie, Head of Art History and Theory, University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha. This project was supported by The Australian High Commission, New Zealand, Davin Industries Ltd. and the Mainland Foundation.