Catharine Cary
is an allindisciplinary artist (who trained as an economic diplomat.) After selling German steam boilers to Asian sweatshops and writing economic development projects in Africa, she built a theater for Disney on New York’s Times Square then jumped ship to paint in Paris.
She has lived and worked in 45 countries across 3 continents.
She founded the nomadic What IIIF? Improvisation Festival.
She improvises with dance and words in front of European audiences since 2005 -- including Festival Territori Bellinzona CH; Courrèges, Paris, FR; and PerformancesKalendar, Rosskha Museum, Gothenburg, SW.
One of her paintings hangs on a yacht between a Diebenkorn and a Motherwell.
She checks the boxes female, queer, and older than most. She also eats as much butter as she can.
Catharine Cary.
I am a noticer. And then I am lemon and salt. My work is to notice edges, borders, selvages and ravines, then to reveal and cherish the space between them and the objects they define. My work inhabits that space, or points a quiet finger to it, sharpening the glance of the onlooker to the present moment. With my body, and through my hand, I live at the crossroads of painting, calligraphy and performance, to break the promise of permanence, and render the silent risk of improvisation palatable. Revelling in the present, I cherish and nourish that instant of comprehension, the moment of shared understanding, the here and now of noticing. It might sound easy, ok, pay attention and get to it. But the noticing is like the zeros and ones of a supercomputer, adding and adjusting at a speed that is faster than our consciousness. Each gesture is informed by everything we have done before, everything and everyone around us, and the idea of a future. When I dance, paint or tag, my heart and soul is breaking the speed of light. I am Catharine Cary, a visual performative artist, hello. My creative work is ephemeral or permanent, thus both. By refining and taking away, lining up, or not even putting something there, I work in flow and movement to seed presence and reveal the elegant obvious, I relish that moment of perfect risk, respecting the structure and letting what fall may.
Artist Statement.