Catherine Bell in ‘One foot on the ground, one foot in the water’ at Caboolture Regional Art Gallery
Catherine Bell’s series of hand-carved sculptures from floral foam, Final resting place (2018–19), will be on show at the Caboolture Regional Art Gallery as a part of the touring group exhibition One foot on the ground, one foot in the water.
On tour from NETS Victoria, the exhibition centres the practices of artists who explicate materially the precarity of our contemporary condition. Yoking thematics of mortality through a material practice, harnessing the lingering uncertainty and infinite permutations of future, this show weaves an inseparable link between life and death through a considered collation of contemporary artists in Australia.
One foot on the ground, one foot in the water Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, Caboolture, QLD 9 March – 1 June 2024
‘Dog Robot Space Star: A Two Cathies Collaboration’ reviewed in Artlink by Jane Trengove
The exhibition Dog Robot Space Star: A Two Cathies Collaboration at Gertrude Contemporary by Catherine Bell and Cathy Staughton, also known as ‘The Two Cathies’, has been featured in ArtLink. In a review by fellow artist Jane Trengove, the article considers the conceptual efficacy of the exhibition, remarking on how “the works of Dog Robot Space Star tackle a duality of care, within the disability space and the human interface with artificial intelligence.”
Working collaboratively since 2009, Catherine Bell and Cathy Staughton have established a unique bond shaped by a shared visual language, social media, painting, filmmaking, a love of dogs, grief, loss and empathy. The exhibition Dog Robot Space Star: A Two Cathies Collaboration was on show at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, between 21 April – 20 May 2023.
Catherine Bell and Cathy Staughton’s collaborative film ‘Dog Robot Space Star’ 2023 is included in this years Mona Foma festival, organised by MONA, Hobart, Tasmania.
Catherine Bell and Cathy Staughton, aka The Two Cathies, have worked together on projects since The Portrait Exchange (2009), their first collaborative venture for Arts Project Australia. The creative partnership’s current project involves working exclusively with the infamous Boston Dynamics Robot ‘Spot’ during a six-month residency at RMIT Health Transformation Lab.
Dog Robot Space Star fuses art, film and technology. Bell’s Dadaist-inspired film explores the impact of COVID lockdowns on the creative psyche and the effect of prolonged, enforced, social isolation on marginalised and vulnerable communities. Staughton’s series of two-dimensional artworks investigate the artist’s passion for technology, and empathic relationship with ‘Spot’ the Boston Dynamics Robot. Situated together, the exhibition raises ethical questions about our duty of care to the technology that companions and serves us. Do we owe a debt of gratitude to the technological devices we bond with over extended periods of time? How should we respond when the technology we rely on malfunctions, becomes old and outdated, ceases and desists?
Review: ‘The ‘Two Cathies’ are centering care through life and robots’ by Duro Jovicic
April 2023
Read Duro Jovicic’s review in Art Guide.
What infuses the film, and Bell and Staughton’s collaboration, is care and ethics. It is not usual for a neurotypical and neurodivergent artist to collaborate so fruitfully, for so long. As Bell has written, the pair’s “collaborative model provides a valuable conceptual framework to think about neurodiverse interactions and how care ethics can reorientate practices, values and procedural standards in professional studios that support artists with disabilities”. It is about creating art in ways that are inclusive, ethical, and genuinely relational.
Catherine Bell & Cathy Staughton present ‘Dog Robot Space Star’ at Gertrude Glasshouse
Catherine Bell and Cathy Staughton, aka The Two Cathies, have worked together on projects since The Portrait Exchange (2009), their first collaborative venture for Arts Project Australia. The creative partnership’s current project involves working exclusively with the infamous Boston Dynamics Robot ‘Spot’ during a six-month residency at RMIT Health Transformation Lab.
Dog Robot Space Star Catherine Bell & Cathy Staughton 21 April – 20 May 2023 Artist Talk: Catherine Bell in conversation with Amelia Winata, Saturday 20 May, 4pm
Catherine Bell and Mia Bow both feature in ‘Fragile Beauty’ alongside Caitlin Dear, Hannah Gartside and Pilar Mata Dupont at Bundoora Homestead until 4 March 2023.
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‘Fragile Beauty’ celebrates the strange and vulnerable existence of being in a human body – an experience that is distinctly individual, yet also part of a shared corporeal reality. The exhibition pays homage to fragile bodies past and present, giving voice to experiences and explorations of embodiment and disembodiment. The exhibition offers artists and visitors a space to reclaim bodily agency by embracing softer states of the human experience that don’t always feel safe to express.
Death is often an uncomfortable topic, but as an inevitable part of life, it’s something that we should seek to find comfort with.
Bone is intrinsically linked to the concept of life and of death, and this event seeks to explore how we can transform it from simply a material, into a concept that collectively connects us.
Join Sutton artist Catherine Bell as she guides participants to sculpt a personal memento to loss and grief, death and dying—and the ways we cope with it that fundamentally make us human.
MMEETS Comfort in the Uncomfortable Sat 18 Feb 2023, 11am—12pm
Once a year, Gertrude opens their private studios to the public, providing audiences with a special opportunity to meet the artists, view works in progress, and experience the environment in which Gertrude Studio Artists create their work. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Join Sutton artists Mia Boe, Catherine Bell & Gian Manik this Saturday 18 February for a peek into their studio practice alongside the 2022-2024 cohort.
Catherine Bell’s new project ‘Maker Unknown’ is a year-long project by Bell to reimagine the City of Melbourne’s Memorial Drinking Fountains as feminist monuments.
‘Maker Unknown (2022)’ is supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants.
Special thanks to the team at the Women’s Art Register for their support of this project.
With new works by Sutton artists Gian Manik and Catherine Bell.
Gertrude’s annual Gertrude Studios exhibition presents new and recent works produced in the organisation’s 16 studios and celebrates the site as a conduit for dialogue and making. As a collective snapshot of the practices supported within the program, the exhibition offers the opportunity to experience a broad diversity of works from leading arts practitioners in Naarm Melbourne, as well as examine material and conceptual developments in contemporary practice.
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The exhibition is conceived across the year by the Gertrude Studio Artists and the Curator in Residence Tim Riley Walsh.
Catherine Bell in the Deakin Small Sculpture Award
Congratulations to Catherine Bell on her inclusion in this years Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award with her work ‘Bouquet #1 (Lily) & Bouquet #2 (Pansy)’
The exhibition of the finalists’ work will be on display at Deakin University Art Gallery from Thursday 8 September 2022–Friday 21 October 2022.
Catherine Bell is included in ‘Art, Death & Disposal’ a group exhibition curated by Elizabeth Hallam, University of Oxford, in collaboration with the DeathTech Research Team from the University of Melbourne.
How might disposal of the deceased be designed in the 21st century?
Imagining beyond burial and cremation – in a world of rapid social, technological and environmental change – seven artists respond to this question, presenting moving and provocative new work.
‘Doing Feminism: Women’s Art and Feminist Criticism in Australia’ by Anne Marsh
Doing Feminism represents over 220 artists and groups including Catherine Bell, Kate Beynon, Vivienne Binns, Anne Ferran, Elizabeth Gower, Sara Hughes, Helen Johnson, Laresa Kosloff, Lindy Lee, Rosslynd Piggott, Nusra Latif Qureshi and Jane Trengove, with 370 colour illustrations punctuated by extracts from artists’ statements, curatorial writing and critique.
Tracking networks of art practice, exhibitions, protest and critical thought over several generations, Marsh demonstrates the innovation and power of women’s art and the ways in which it has influenced and changed the contemporary art landscape in Australia and internationally.
Catherine Bell finalist in STILL: National Still Life Award 2021.
Catherine Bell is a finalist in STILL: National Still Life Award 2021 with her series, ‘Daphne’s Fountain 1-3’. An exhibition of finalists work will be on view at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery from 14 August – 23 October 2021.
Catherine Bell is included in One Foot on the Ground, One Foot in the Water at La Trobe Art Institute. Curated by Travis Curtain, the exhibition explores the subject of mortality and the inseperable link between life and death. The exhibition continues until Sunday 17 January, 2021.
Curated by Dr Catherine Bell and including represented artists Helga Groves and Jane Trengove, FEM-aFFINITY brings together female artists from Arts Project Australia and across the country whose work shares an affinity of subject and process. The Devonport iteration runs until 15 March 2020 and will continue to tour nationally through out 2020-2021.
Jane Trengove and Catherine Bell participate in the Care Project Symposium week
Jane Trengove and Catherine Bell recently participated in the interdisciplinary symposium CARE: transforming values through art, ethics and feminism. Trengove and Bell co-presented the session: Whose Voice: Our Voices/Your Voices – Towards an Ethics of Care in Art Practice, alongside Pie Rankine and Susan Long. The symposium was an initiative of Care Project, a research project that explores how care in its many forms represents an alternative ethics to neo-liberalism. It will connect and explore researchers and artists working with care in a number of ways; Care as Relational, Care as Political Labour, Care as Moral Theory, Caring for earth/Country, Art Practice as Care – Care as Art Practice.
Catherine Bell is included in Pets are people too. The exhibition is a collaboration between Bayside Gallery and Arts Project Australia, and brings together Australian artists whose work reflects on the intimacy and affection that exists between humans and animals.
Pets are people too Bayside Gallery, Brighton Town Hall 27 July – 6 October, 2019
Catherine Bell and Karen Black at Museum of Brisbane
Catherine Bell and Karen Black are included in New Woman, an exhibition celebrating Brisbane’s most significant and ground-breaking female artists over the past 100 years.
New Woman Museum of Brisbane 13 September, 2019 – 15 March, 2020
Helga Groves and Jane Trengove are both included in FEM-aFFINITY, a group show curated by Catherine Bell. The exhibition brings together female contemporary artists from Arts Project Australia and wider Victoria whose work share an affinity of subject and process. In doing so, FEM-aFFINITY seeks to uncover shared perspectives and variations on female identity. Following its first iteration, the exhibition will tour nationally throughout 2020 and 2021.
