Natural Artifice,
In May of 2014, Catizone showed a large body of work in a solo exhibition, 'Natural Artifice' at Soma Contemporary, Waterford. She used a variety of materials, including plastic and natural found objects.
Exhibited at
Untitled (two-hand drawing)
“Drawing is not a window on the world but a device for understanding our place in the universe”
— Emma Dexter
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.