catherine widgery

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Artist Statement, Studio Work

My creative life has been one of discovery and reinvention. Each work leads me down new paths, as does each place I visit, each commission or exhibition offer. Why make sculpture in this world already overcrowded with “stuff”? I struggle with this. For years, I felt it was justified because we are too often disconnected from the natural world and from our own bodies; our senses are dulled as we sit at a physical remove from our environment. So I made physical objects that bring that natural world back into our personal space in a way that confronted and unsettled us out of complacency. Everything from crab claws, to feathers, bark, insects, stuffed animals and leaves, we could smell and touch things we had not really “seen” until they were presented in a new context. I played with ideas of nostalgia and the tricks of memory, with objects from a lost time, a past we can sense, even mourn, always trying to unlock the magic spirit that lives within the physical object.

In the past couple of years however, I have been moving beyond the concrete object. Perhaps I am alarmed by all the consumption of material things, as if we could fill some indefinable void within us with “stuff”. Now my work speaks of letting go of things and heightening our awareness of our perceptions and the ephemeral. I still want to shake the viewer out of his complacency and numbness, but less through the object and more through the experience.

Evolving with my experimenting with materials over the years has been an interest in the way we are influenced by the tools the media uses to bring us so much of our experience of the world. Print reproduction, TV, movies, all are now digitalized, ordered at a level below our awareness, but I think the brain perceives that order and this fits neatly with an inclination towards structure and order that is profoundly human. The grid, pixels, mathematical proportions, sequencing, all these are interesting tools that challenge the chaos always threatening to engulf us. Indeed it is the line at the edge of chaos where there is great energy, a kind of order without stasis and entropy.

I am interested in exploring that which is just beyond our ability to consciously perceive. Recently I videotaped confetti falling through the air, butterflies in flight, lightening at night and waves crashing, then I slowed down these complex visual experiences so we see them in a whole new way. We know when we look at a solid cube and a hollow one which one is which, but how, why? The brain perceives things we don’t realize or understand and I want to explore this uncharted territory.