The large scale wall installation A Soft Archive, subverts the utility of a common vertical blind. Through the simple gesture of hanging the blind horizontally, it bows under its own weight. The usually formal lines of the blind are bent and skewed, like layers of earth or a rogue musical score, so that it distorts and reflects back the light it is designed to block.
A Soft Archive, Vertical blind, found rock, 220 x 320cm, 2022. The development of this work is supported by the Sonderstipendiumprogramm INITIAL, Akademie der Künste.
Exhibited in Silent Spring, (curated by Lena Fließbach), 2022, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin DE.
Exploded View is a photo series that takes the artists’ personal memory of the 1997 Royal Canberra Hospital implosion as a starting point to examine how digital media acts to distort our perception of time, relation to place and personal and collective memory.
Using screenshots taken directly from YouTube and then manipulated on a scanner bed, the artist introduces an interference into the timeline in the act of thinking about alternatives to linear time and the disruption of memory, both on a personal and national level.
Exploded View, series of 5 silver gelatin contact prints on fibre-based paper, mounted on aluminium, each 50 x 39cm, 2021.
Exhibited in the solo exhibition Exploded View , 2021, PhotoAccess, Canberra AU with accompanying catalogue text, ‘Interfering with the Evidence,’ by Margaret Woodward >>
Also within the framework of the exhibition, Artist in Conversation: ‘The Corruptability of Time and How we (un)do Memory,’ with Dr Michael Pickering, Senior Repatriation Officer at the National Museum of Australia, hosted by PhotoAccess >>
Installation views: Gemma Fischer Photography.
Tools for Direct Democratic Action appropriates common steel gardening tools manufactured in the DDR. Through their deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction on both ends of over-sized handles, they are rendered dysfunctional, while also referencing the common gardening tools’ capacity to be used as a weapon.
Tools for Direct Democratic Action, found steel gardening tools, wood, each approx. 50 x 400cm, 2022.
Developed for StadtGarten Salvisberg (initiated by Christof Zwiener), 2022 with accompanying catalogue text by Christof Zwiener.
Supported by Stadt findet Kunst, district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Berlin DE. Photos: Christof Zwiener.
Mountain Mother is a collaborative project with Piotr Pietrus that spans photography, video and assemblage. In the work we searched for contemporary traces of the Roman goddess, Cybele, or "Mother of the Mountains” in the Die region, Southern France. According to legend, born from a black meteorite, Cybele was honoured in antiquity as one of the greatest goddesses of the Near East and was introduced to Die by the Romans in the 2nd century AD. With great sensitivity to the magic of things, we find her portrait hidden in the shadows of broken
river stones and in the regions’ natural features, resulting in a poetic work that ultimately holds the search for a modern day goddess at its gravitational centre.
Mountain Mother, Catherine Rose Evans & Piotr Pietrus, photographs and assemblage, various dimensions, 2020-2021.
Mountain Mother was developed during DIEresidenz, an artist residency in southeastern France, 2020, and subsequently exhibited in Musée de Die et du Diois, France 2021, in an exhibition curated by Conny Becker.
Underscore is made from large pieces of steel reinforcing bars (or rebar) that have been recovered from a local construction site. A common building material used to strengthen concrete, the bars are buckled as a result of the force needed to extract them from their concrete housing.
Underscore, found steel reinforcing bars, rocks, 380 x 180cm, 2022.
Exhibited in Troubling Time, 2022, Slice Berlin DE.
Die Erde, die Achse is a large-scale installation that appropriates the basic elements of Foucualt’s Pendulum, a simple instrument that gave the first direct evidence of the Earth’s rotation. The instrument’s basic elements - a large metal circle and pendulum - are reconfigured so that all symmetry is lost. The circle lays skewed over a large granite boulder and the pendulum sits stationary at one edge.
Die Erde, die Achse, aluminium, granite, unfixed photographic print, circle diameter 3.8m, 2020.
Developed for Collapse (curated by Martin Steffens and Rebekka Liebmann), the main exhibition of 48 Stunden Neukölln 2020 in the historical Umspannwerk Neukölln, Berlin DE. Supported by the Fachbereich Kultur von Neukölln. First photograph: Virginia Garfunkel.
Commissioned novella as part of the series Lost Rocks by A Published Event.
”Artist Catherine Evans’ newly published Fictionella COPPER, pivots on a series of events, that span explosions and implosions, moments of birth, and draws on her experience as a student of archaeology. Partly set in Canberra and partly in Berlin COPPER, brings to the surface new vocabularies that give language to how we comprehend large time scales (A Published Event).”
Copper was launched as part of the Listening in the Anthropocene symposium at Charles Sturt University, 2020. Lost Rocks is a slow publishing series of forty books over five years (2017-21). Conceived by A Published Event and composed by forty contemporary artists from around the world, Lost Rocks is an accumulative event of mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling.
Copper III, 95 pages with illustrations. ‘Lost Rocks’ series, A Published Event, Hobart Tasmania AU. ISBN 978-0-6484927-8-8, 2020. Available to purchase >>
Review of Copper by Berlin-based curator and writer An Paenhuysen >>
Mamor, for Antonina, is a collection of recent collages made from the torn pages of books found on Berlin streets. The simple gesture of obscuring key parts of marble sculptures with low-fi black and white landscapes is an attempt to reframe our material references.
Each collage is presented on a single coloured pole that reaches between the ceiling and floor, mirroring the museum display systems found in the original images, although each only lightly secured by a paper clip.
Mamor, for Antonina; pages from found books, paper clips, steel, dimensions variable, 2019.
Exhibited at tête, Berlin as part of Memory Work, 2019.
Gravity and Proximity, found steel hook, rock, 90 x 15cm, 2021.
Exhibited in Breeze and Storm, (curated by Constanze Schweda) 48 Stunden Neukölln 2021, SubTei, Berlin DE
Standing Stone is an installation that transposes the marks on our own bodies into a large-scale map using rocks, steel poles and sticky tape. The position of each rock is determined by the pattern of moles and other blemishes on the artists’ own back. By joining these points using transparent sticky tape, a new three-dimensional constellation is created.
For this most recent installation quartz crystal rocks collected from the edge of a disused mine in Poland were used. Using local materials was important in this iteration of the work as it acts to anchor the work in its European context.
Standing Stone II; quartz crystal, steel, sticky tape, 5.6 x 3m, 2019.
Exhibited in RAUMANEIGNUNG (curated by Conny Becker) at Milchhof am Pavillon, Berlin, as part of the Interiors to Being program (curated by Pauline Doutreluingne and April Gertler), 2019. Exhibition catalogue text by Conny Becker.
Subsequently exhibited at Galerie im Saalbau for the Neuköllner Kunstpreis 2020 (awarded first prize).
A landfall can either announce an arrival at land, or inversely, the collapse of a mass of land. The installation Land Fall plays with these opposing meanings.
Appropriating a 100-year-old bluestone foundation block that was excavated from the heart of Melbourne, this incredibly dense and hard geological material that once formed the solid foundation for our homes, is then smashed into varying sizes and presented on the surface of a common domestic material: carpet. The proximity of these two materials results in an unexpected juxtaposition of geological matter (rocks) and domestic material (carpet); separated not only by interior and exterior, but also their respective time frames.
Land Fall draws our attention to the shifts in time-perception between the two materials: the artist draws the shadows of the rocks directly onto the surface of the carpet by simply changing the direction of the fibres so that light is reflected at different angles. The viewer is invited to circle the work, and as they do so, the carpet’s surface also changes, just as distant land seen across an ocean can also appear to shift on approach.
Land Fall; carpet, granite stone, 3 x 3.2m, 2019.
Installation view as part of Jack’s Reloaded: Material as Memory (curated by Eugene Perepletchikov & Georgia Nowak) as part of Melbourne Design Week, 2019, Melbourne AU >>
Supported by Metro Tunnels. Installation documentation by Matthew Stanton.
Irrstern is a large-scale wall installation where roughly cut quartz crystal collected from the forest around a mine in Lower Silesia, Poland, are mounted on a dusty pink carpet; resulting in an unexpected juxtaposition of geological matter (rocks) and domestic material (carpet), two materials that usually occur under our feet.
The shadows of the rocks are drawn directly onto the surface of the carpet by simply changing the direction of the fibres so that light reflects at different angles, giving the illusion of movement to what are otherwise stationary, heavy objects.
Irrstern, carpet, quartz crystal stone, 4 x 3.8 m, 2017.
Installation view at tête as part, Mammalia, with Piotr Pietrus. Also exhibited in The Presence of Absence at Kunstverein Neukölln, both 2017, Berlin DE.
Standing Stone is an installation that transposes the marks on our own bodies into a large-scale map using basalt boulders collected from the Western Victorian Volcanic Plains, steel poles and sticky tape.
The position of each rock is determined by the pattern of moles and other blemishes on the artists’ own back. By joining these points using transparent sticky tape, a new three-dimensional constellation is created.
Referencing the ancient Indigenous stone arrangements present in the area that the stones were collected and the stellar constellations whose movements they trace, the installation crosses both the geographic and corporeal timescales – traversing the mineral to organic and the infinite to the micro.
Standing Stone; steel, aluminium, volcanic rocks, sticky tape, 718 x 400 cm, 2014.
Exhibited in the solo exhibition Standing Stone, BLINDSIDE, Melbourne, 2014, with support from Arts Victoria and the Victorian College of the Arts. Exhibition catalogue text, ‘With the Universe at Our Backs,’ by Laura Skerlj >>
Exhibited also in HEAVY FORMS (curated by Ace Wagstaff), Rubicon ARI, Melbourne, 2016. Installation images 1-6 by Matthew Stanton.
Constellation is an installation of silver gelatin photographs and sticky tape. A photograph of the artists' own back has been inverted, so that the usually dark moles and blemishes on her skin appear as small points of light against a dark, ambiguous surface. These points of light are joined using a ruler and ball point pen to create a new constellation, akin to the mapping of stars against a night sky.
Constellation I & II; ballpoint pen on silver gelatin photographic paper, 20 x 25 cm, 2016.
Exhibited at the Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne, as part of the Artist in Residence program, 2016, and in the Neuköllner Kunstpreis 2020, Galerie im Saalbau, Berlin DE.
Batholith is a site-specific installation of photography and sculpture. Using undeveloped photographic paper and sticky tape, a crude solargraph traces the movement of light falling through the west-facing window of the gallery.
This is juxtaposed against three photographs: a portrait of an older woman, a rock and a weathered piece of bone. All absorb time, albeit at different rates.
Batholith; framed photographs, unfixed colour photographic paper, basalt rock, sticky tape, variable dimensions, 2013.
Exhibited in the solo exhibition Batholith at Knight Street Art Space, Melbourne, 2013, with support from Arts Victoria and the Victorian College of the Arts. Exhibition catalogue text by Samuel Webster. Subsequently exhibited in Temporality (curated by Jessica Tamar Snir), The Attic Gallery, and at the Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, both 2015, Melbourne AU.
A photograph taken from the artist’s family archive is mirrored and repeated. Playing with the negative and positive found naturally with unusual markings of the body, this is juxtaposed against a small rock balanced on a kenzan; a bodily form, framed, that also holds it own blemishes in the pattern of lichen on its surface.
Blemish; photographic adhesive, wood, kenzan, stone, 120 x 247 cm, 2013. Original photograph by Janet Evans.
Exhibited in Ensphere (curated by Emma Hamilton), Platform Public Contemporary Art Space, 2013, Melbourne AU.
In response to the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, a photograph of a woman from the artist’s family archive is juxtaposed with the precariously balanced weight of a volcanic rock, modified domestic objects and a poem.
Bedrock (installation); photographs, volcanic rock, modified wooden chair, steel, pin, butterfly, paper, dimensions variable, 2012.
Exhibited in the solo exhibition, Bedrock, at Rae and Bennett Gallery, 2012, Melbourne AU.
