Victoria Cattoni is an Australian artist who originates from Ingham, in the tropics of north Queensland. She had her first solo show at Salamanca Gallery/Dick Bett Gallery (now Bett Gallery) in Hobart in 1988, the year after graduating from her arts degree. That was an exhibition of paintings, which came as a surprise to her audience after four years of working and exhibiting in a variety of other media. She continued to paint but switched back to installation several years prior to her leaving Australia for Indonesia in 1998. During her six years in Indonesia, she was extremely productive, holding several solo shows in Bali, Jakarta, Bandung and Jogjakarta. In addition to this, she coordinated a major international art event in Bali and collaborated with contemporary artists and arts communities in various centres in Indonesia and completed a Masters Research project focussing on the ‘kebaya’. During this time her installation work expanded to include video and performance art. An Asialink grant took her to Malaysia in 2005, where she continued to immerse herself in the local arts community, including exhibiting at the Museum of the Universiti Sains Malaysia and later at the State Museum of Penang. An Australia Council grant then afforded her the chance to initiate what became a four-year project in Malaysia, Australia and Singapore. This video performance project titled ‘What if I wan to water-ski? And other questions’, focussed on trying to open up dialogue on perceptions and common misperceptions concerning the ‘hijab’. Details of this project can be found on her website. Since relocating to Singapore in 2008, she has been invited to exhibit her video performance and mixed media work in Singapore, Jakarta, Bandung, Penang and Brunei. Cattoni says she never stopped painting, but her painting certainly took a background role to her other practice and she rarely exhibited these works. Commenting on the change in 2011, she says:
"The return to painting was a sudden urge – I literally woke one morning and wondered where my oil paints were (which country!) and wanted very much to put paint on canvas. This may seem a rather wide leap from my art practice of the past twenty years – installation, video, performance art - but whose creative path is linear? The urge to paint again, I feel, came from a desire to touch and fashion something with my hands and body; it was perhaps an antidote, and a salve to the digital screen."
This initiated her first trip to Portugal, where she spent six weeks at Obras, an arts residency set in the landscape of the Alentejo region, east of Lisbon. She has returned twice to the residency since and will return again in 2016.
She describes her attachment to the place and residency of Obras:
"The space and light here is not unlike parts of Australia that I have lived in, but the Alentejo has its own idiosyncracies; it is, perhaps, a more gentle landscape. What the residency at Obras provides, is a creatively supportive environment and a place of quiet beauty in which one can be totally immersed. You have the benefit of interaction with others yet all the privacy you desire. Add to this a constantly changing landscape and sky, lit by a very special light."
Victoria further talks about her process:
"Painting for me is solace, play and journeying. I would hesitate to call the work either abstract or figurative – the tendency for viewers to construe something literal from the non-representational is always there but I hope the marks, the shapes, have enough ambiguity and possibility so that they remain porous and in motion. I also create small works on paper from observation: from the landscape, and from bits and pieces of found organic things – dried grasses, flowers, garlic bulbs, old cheese, fruit peelings. There’s no direct process from these small ‘still-lifes’ to the non-representational works; but the marks, movements and shapes must lodge somewhere in my memory providing a sensory vocabulary. I also walk a lot and photograph details of the landscape I’m in, as another way to focus. Colour choice is intuitive.
I generally spend 2-3 weeks on a painting and work on several at a time, putting paint down, wiping bits off, over and over, much of it done with the painting on the horizontal, on the ground. Later layers and marks tend to be worked on the vertical, but the paintings move from the wall to floor and back. The final orientation of the canvas – top and bottom - is only decided quite near the end, once a sense of gravity is achieved.
There is no plan and I have no idea of what the painting will be; I try to set up conditions so that I can enter a space in which I can move between playful abandon and intense consideration. There is a need to touch and work and move about with colour and tools and music and not think, and create surprising paintings that make me want to look and get lost in and wander over and around and wonder at and feel. So the results could be perceived as captured frames of fuzzy stories in which certain impulses are sensuously ‘netted’ and rendered onto a surface with paint. The painting should always surprise me. It is a ‘scape’ of love, loss, colour, beauty, problem solving, wandering, and a lull – leaving the mind behind – even, for just seconds at a time."
Victoria Cattoni is an Australian artist who originates from Ingham, in the tropics of north Queensland. She had her first solo show at Salamanca Gallery/Dick Bett Gallery (now Bett Gallery) in Hobart in 1988, the year after graduating from her arts degree. That was an exhibition of paintings, which came as a surprise to her audience after four years of working and exhibiting in a variety of other media. She continued to paint but switched back to installation several years prior to her leaving Australia for Indonesia in 1998. During her six years in Indonesia, she was extremely productive, holding several solo shows in Bali, Jakarta, Bandung and Jogjakarta. In addition to this, she coordinated a major international art event in Bali and collaborated with contemporary artists and arts communities in various centres in Indonesia and completed a Masters Research project focussing on the ‘kebaya’. During this time her installation work expanded to include video and performance art. An Asialink grant took her to Malaysia in 2005, where she continued to immerse herself in the local arts community, including exhibiting at the Museum of the Universiti Sains Malaysia and later at the State Museum of Penang. An Australia Council grant then afforded her the chance to initiate what became a four-year project in Malaysia, Australia and Singapore. This video performance project titled ‘What if I wan to water-ski? And other questions’, focussed on trying to open up dialogue on perceptions and common misperceptions concerning the ‘hijab’. Details of this project can be found on her website. Since relocating to Singapore in 2008, she has been invited to exhibit her video performance and mixed media work in Singapore, Jakarta, Bandung, Penang and Brunei. Cattoni says she never stopped painting, but her painting certainly took a background role to her other practice and she rarely exhibited these works. Commenting on the change in 2011, she says:
"The return to painting was a sudden urge – I literally woke one morning and wondered where my oil paints were (which country!) and wanted very much to put paint on canvas. This may seem a rather wide leap from my art practice of the past twenty years – installation, video, performance art - but whose creative path is linear? The urge to paint again, I feel, came from a desire to touch and fashion something with my hands and body; it was perhaps an antidote, and a salve to the digital screen."
This initiated her first trip to Portugal, where she spent six weeks at Obras, an arts residency set in the landscape of the Alentejo region, east of Lisbon. She has returned twice to the residency since and will return again in 2016.
She describes her attachment to the place and residency of Obras:
"The space and light here is not unlike parts of Australia that I have lived in, but the Alentejo has its own idiosyncracies; it is, perhaps, a more gentle landscape. What the residency at Obras provides, is a creatively supportive environment and a place of quiet beauty in which one can be totally immersed. You have the benefit of interaction with others yet all the privacy you desire. Add to this a constantly changing landscape and sky, lit by a very special light."
Victoria further talks about her process:
"Painting for me is solace, play and journeying. I would hesitate to call the work either abstract or figurative – the tendency for viewers to construe something literal from the non-representational is always there but I hope the marks, the shapes, have enough ambiguity and possibility so that they remain porous and in motion. I also create small works on paper from observation: from the landscape, and from bits and pieces of found organic things – dried grasses, flowers, garlic bulbs, old cheese, fruit peelings. There’s no direct process from these small ‘still-lifes’ to the non-representational works; but the marks, movements and shapes must lodge somewhere in my memory providing a sensory vocabulary. I also walk a lot and photograph details of the landscape I’m in, as another way to focus. Colour choice is intuitive.
I generally spend 2-3 weeks on a painting and work on several at a time, putting paint down, wiping bits off, over and over, much of it done with the painting on the horizontal, on the ground. Later layers and marks tend to be worked on the vertical, but the paintings move from the wall to floor and back. The final orientation of the canvas – top and bottom - is only decided quite near the end, once a sense of gravity is achieved.
There is no plan and I have no idea of what the painting will be; I try to set up conditions so that I can enter a space in which I can move between playful abandon and intense consideration. There is a need to touch and work and move about with colour and tools and music and not think, and create surprising paintings that make me want to look and get lost in and wander over and around and wonder at and feel. So the results could be perceived as captured frames of fuzzy stories in which certain impulses are sensuously ‘netted’ and rendered onto a surface with paint. The painting should always surprise me. It is a ‘scape’ of love, loss, colour, beauty, problem solving, wandering, and a lull – leaving the mind behind – even, for just seconds at a time."