Sculpture

Performance

Ecosocial

The melting of ice caps marks the time of our planets’ transformation. Grief about the loss of majestic icebergs is part of our collective grief for the loss of our natural expectations of our future life on the planet. The inexorability of time frames this work.

This video records a recent performance at IMMA, as part of the 

Wearing a wetsuit under a hand felted dress, and using layers of felt, lanolin and other natural fats (a nod to Joseph Beuys and to Siberian Shamans), the artist plays with large blocks of ice.

Holding, carrying, moving from location to location. The balancing of ice on the head references the gestures of African water carriers. The pushing and dragging of the blue-died ice along the ground creates watery marks, a sort of embodied, ephemeral drawing through the public site.

Most of the time, an immediate response to materials, body and site dictates the actions.

A quiet presence through the busy festival, Qanuk offered visitors fleeting encounters with the process and the images it engendered. The performance engaged with ice, body, water and time. Its duration, two hours approximately, was dictated by the time the ice took to melt.

Qanuk is a work in progress and the artist is developing new iterations.

Live Art Ireland, Milford House, Tipperary, Ireland & Online

Alive & Kicking

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Earth Rising

Earth Rising, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Qanuk Snowflake

Installation

Audiovisual

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

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

Sculpture

Qanuk Snowflake, 2022

Earth Rising, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Being Water, 2018

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

Light, Plastic, Water, 2012

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