Installation

Paola Catizone, with visitor participation.

Performance

Collaboration

For the Peatlands Project exhibition at Castletown House, Paola Catizone facilitated two movement workshops, aimed at exploring the parallels between the human body and the body of the planet. 

Through experiential anatomy, breathwork, movement games, meditation and discussion, Paola supported participants in gaining awareness of the fluid systems in the body in relation to the complex inter-connectedness of all physical systems.There was an emphasis on interconnectedness as the underlying principle in the living world. 

Catizone also built a shadow installation in Castletown House's stables, using lights, found and organic objects and pre-crafted recycled plastic.

She invited members of the public to draw and cut out their images which were then added to the shadow installation in response to the Peatlands project. The workshops and shadow play animated the space and fomented public engagement and discussion.

For IMMAs’ Earth Rising Festival 2023, Catizone developed the two movement workshops to include extra time for the crafting of a performance. Catizone invited five artists to participate in the performance and held a number of online discussions with them in order to give information on the peatlands and on the performance concept.

The discussions also invited participants to contribute their images and ideas. Catizone ‘s work includes relational Art processes, where discussion and co-creation are encouraged. 

With minimal time available for performance practice (which only took place at the end of the two workshops and online) Catizone invited performers to improvise and to bring their area of specialisation to the fore.

,  became a ritual of healing for the Irish Peatlands and it included poetry readings, drawing, chanting, movement and dance. 

Bodyscapes was filmed in full and the resulting video will be screened at the opening of The Peatlands Project at Birr Castle on the 9th of November of 2023.

Castletown House, Celbridge, County Kildare

The Peatlands Project: Castletown House

Copper Tree Gallery, Birr Castle Demesne, Birr, County Offaly

The Peatlands Project: Birr Castle

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Earth Rising

The Peatlands Project: Castletown House, Earth Rising & Birr Castle

Bodyscapes

Audiovisual

Sculpture

Water pollution, especially by plastic, is a recurring theme in Catizone’s work.

Light, Plastic, Water, a video previously created by Catizone and featuring a sound track by Robin Sherry Wood

For Sculpture in Context 2018, in Dublin’s Botanical Gardens, Catizone displayed Light, Plastic, Water video and soundtrack, as well as her sculptural works, made with up-cycled plastic to create an immersive environment.

The series of three performances sought to activate the space with a necessary sense of loss for our diminished environment and also with play and hope for appropriate action. Participants were invited to observe, to follow in a procession to the stream, where an old bottle of holy water, found in an abandoned house, was poured into the living water running through the Gardens. Viewers were then invited to return to the exhibition space for a conversation on our experiences of the ecological crisis.

The use of UV light during the performance referred  to the fluorescence  of deep sea creatures. Lists of names of extinct and at risk water flora and fauna were written in ultraviolet ink and were sourced from the Marine Life section of the 

The artist adopted the persona of Grandmother Water which allowed her to embody concern for  future generations on this planet.  The symbiotic relationship between the human body and water  ( cellular, inter cellular, lymph, blood, cerebro-spinal, synovial fluids  etc....) were explored during the movement sequences in the performances.

Most people worry about the planet, allowing open discussion and a ritualised set of gestures facilitated the groups to connect to feelings of sadness, grief  and fear. This emotional awareness is the foundation of all ecological activism, whether through art or direct action.

The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Sculpture in Context

Sculpture in Context, The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Being Water

Drawing

Dance

Performative drawing and collaboration have been central to Paola’s work for years. The artist sees the body as the locus of both personal and cultural narratives. Institutional oppression begins with the control of bodies and with the regulation of drives and impulses. In a time of mass displacement and forced migrations the body can become the only home left to inhabit, and bodies, in revolt, war or natural disasters, perform in the spectacle of TV and online news.

, the artist explored the possibility of building an installation that also functioned as  a stage set in the theatrical  sense. Sound became part of  the drawing  performances, prompting synaesthetic responses. Collaborating with Fiona Quilligan was an initiation into  the choreographic process..  DJ and broadcaster Nigel Wood brought his vast world music collection and his expertise to the project. Thanks to Sami Moukaddem for offering the use of his music to this project.

Two earlier solo exhibitions, Natural Artifice at Soma Contemporary in 2014, and Body Drawings, at Pallas projects in Dublin in 2012, had displayed Catizone’s two hand drawings, performance videos and other drawings and paintings. Choreographer Fiona Quilligan was a guest performer at the openings.

Converge Diverge emerged from these earlier iterations. In The back Loft, Catizone’s earlier drawings were shown and new work was also made in situ, with the addition of sound added to the drawing process.

La Catedral Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Converge Diverge

After exploring performative drawings for years, Catizone moved away from the use of hand- held drawing materials to use the whole body as the means of mark making.  

Based on a dance exploration aimed at sensitising the skin, the movement sequence employed involved bringing the entire surface of the body in touch with the graphite powder placed on  the drawing surface which was in turn secured onto the gallery floor.

This project consisted of a series of seven performances, one every day. One of seven hand made white dresses was used on each performance , and was transformed from pure white to dusty black, until, one by one, at the end of the seven days, all dresses had been darkened.

Each performance was filmed daily and added to the projection in the space, increasing the duration of the video and engaging with time as a working  element.

Performance props and traces were accumulated to build an installation.

An edited version of Smudge was selected and  shown as part of RAW, a  performance art online exhibition organized by the performance collective Bbeyond in January of  2021.

Bbeyond Performance Collective, Online

RAW virtual exhibition

Satellite Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Motley

A4 Gallery, Thomas Street, Dublin, Ireland

NCAD MFA Show

NCAD MFA Show, A4 Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Smudge

“Drawing is not a window on the world but a device for understanding our place in the universe”

Catizone’s work is the fruit of an ongoing practice that has been developing over several years. She became interested in drawing during her BA, when she started producing large drawings.

Scale added a physical element to her work,  with the artist drawing on her background in movement and dance. The large scale of the drawings  also gave an immersive feel to the process, a sense of being within the drawing, sensing its lines kinesthetically rather than visually controlling them from the outside.

The work gradually became more embodied, and she began to use choreographic parameters to give structure to long sessions of drawing. These became more performative, with the process as much part of the work as the finished pieces. She soon began to interact and collaborate with dancers, choreographers and musicians.

A number of students and dance professionals volunteered to work with Catizone in the Students Gallery in NCAD in March of 2013. The work was documented in film and, together with the drawings made, used for an exhibition in Pallas Projects in May of 2013.

The discordances between live, mediated, natural and unnatural are at the center of this work. The artist  questions the claims of authenticity and truthfulness in art: is live performance more real than video? Does the ‘halo’ of authenticity lend value to a work of art?  How much can we trust what we see? Especially when reality and information are mediated through the lenses, the editing tools and the technological apparatuses of contemporary media.

The ephemerality and directness of performative drawing responds to current values of chronic socio/economic uncertainty and of media filtering of truth. In drawing, direct experience and impermanence are proposed to the viewer, who becomes witness to the live emergence of lines.

This is contrary to tradition where drawing and painting have taken place in isolation, in the privacy of the studio. Through immediate gestures marks are conveyed without effects or technical artifice, in a quest for a truthfulness of mark making and of presence.

Embodied drawing has its roots in the practice of a line of artists like Robert Morris, Morgan O’Hara and Matthew Barney to name a few.

A performance in collaboration with DJ Nigel Wood and Choreographer Fiona Quilligan took place during the month of the exhibition.

Soma Contemporary, Waterford, Ireland

Natural Aritifice

Permanent collection. Garter Lane Museum, Waterford, Ireland

Untitled (two-hand drawing)

Natural Artifice

Ian Nolan and Paola Catizone collaborated to produce a film based on Paola’s two-hand drawing  performative  practice.

Catizone held multiple graphite sticks in each hand to create  complex drawings based on simple choreographic parameters:

Arm span determining the scale of the drawing

Repetition and rhythm underlying the movements

Nolan overlapped three layers of video to create the illusion of three identical female figures moving and drawing together,  reminiscent of the layering methods used in drawing and painting, with an hypnotic effect.

The spider-like triple figure that emerged seemed to be weaving a thick web of lines, patiently building through repetition.  Catizone’s notion of art- making as a meditative practice and of weaving as a metaphor for  repairing and healing are embodied in this work.

Nataraja is the many armed god of dance, one of the emanations of the god Shiva in the Hindy tradition. Catizone’s four decades of work as a yoga and movement facilitator influenced the spirit of the two hand drawings, which were at first performed to the sound of Indian Ragas.

For Collaborations 2014, Nataraja was  projected on a large sheet of Fabriano paper and presented  with  an accompanying  set of choreographic drawing directions and chunks of graphite for public use. The work became interactive, with public participation filmed and edited into the original video,and incorporated into the projection.

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Collaborations

Collaborations, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Nataraja

Catizone displayed a set of large, performative, two-hand drawings which she made over the space of two years. The drawings were made to either live music or to a selection of tracks curated by DJ Nigel Wood.

Wood played at the opening and a recorded selection of tracks used for the making of the drawings were played in the gallery for the week.

Choreographer Fiona Quilligan performed an embodied response to the work on the opening night also.

A short talk and Q&A session took place after the performance.

Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Body Drawings

Pallas Projects, Dublin, Ireland

It took months of meticulous hand crafting to upcycle the hundreds of collected plastic bottles used in the sculptural aspect of the exhibition. The patient, craft-like repetitive movements used through this process had meditative, performative qualities.  The performance was a ritual  offering to the polluted waters of our lakes, seas and waterways.  The geometrical beauty of diatoms, the smallest water based life forms inspired the sculptural forms. A large, blue, hanging sculpture, made of cut and heated plastic bottles, became the “Waterfall”.

Plastic watery beings populated the exhibition space, with the transparency and clarity of plastic reflecting materially on the appearance of water. A reflective wall, made of fishing tackle, was woven, by repeatedly climbing and kneeling down from ceiling to floor, in a ritualistic, performative set of actions.

A long video: ‘Light, Plastic Water,’ was filmed by the artist in three locations, all of which she considered home. The film features the  heavily polluted stream running through the Landstown Valley, near the artist home in South Dublin, streams near Ashford, Co Wicklow, where she spent time caretaking an abandoned house, and the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, as they lapped the shores of Las canteras beach, in her mother’s native Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria.

As an embodiment facilitator, Catizone has an awareness of the prominence of the element of water in the human body, our most enduring and essential home.

Robin Sherry Wood composed the soundtrack for Light, Plastic Water, creating two sound pieces for two different versions of the video.

The artist's daughters, Francesca and Amy, and even her little dog, Oscar, appear in 

, a home video that takes its name from the title of a poem by EECummins. The two  women’s readings see an overlapping of Sweet Spontaneous with an excerpt from a book by environmental scientist David Attemborough, building up to a chaotic crescendo. They wear head pieces made of up-cycled plastic.


Light, Plastic, Water is a meditation on plastic pollution of our waters and our bodies. It hopes to move viewers to take action on plastic production and waste.

Paola Catizone

Installation

Bodyscapes, 2023

The Peatlands Project: Castletown House, Earth Rising & Birr Castle

Being Water, 2018

Sculpture in Context, The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Converge Diverge, 2015

La Catedral Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Smudge, 2014

NCAD MFA Show, A4 Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Natural Artifice, 2014

Soma Contemporary, Waterford, Ireland

Nataraja, 2014

Collaborations, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Body Drawings, 2013

Pallas Projects, Dublin, Ireland

Light, Plastic, Water, 2012

NCAD Graduate Show, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland