“Edging Still”
Cate Consandine
2 Apr → 17 Apr 2004

"My appliqué is a wet unbroken line, a circle, lipstick pink, which edges like insomnia, and holds in its arena, life still." — Cat Consadine

Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums including sculpture and spatial practice, film and performance. She works with the body as material for her practice, and is particularly interested in the physical expression of psychological states, the relationships between bodies and space, and their contingent emotional registers. Acts of cutting, and the resulting fragment or part-object, are often utilised as an editing and performing strategy in the moving image, and as a reductive strategy central to the sculptural process.

Her work seeks to locate experience between stillness and movement, or the place where desire is posited—the edge of movement—and particularly fixes on the liminal body; a body on edge in the landscape. For example, recent video works filmed on location in the clay pans and desert lakes of outback New South Wales present staged performances, unfolding and exploring the relationships between subject and landscape from a (post)colonial perspective. Presented in dialogue with one another, these concentrated and highly contrived scenarios invoke a series of binaries—active/passive, barren/abundant, open/contained, composed/uneasy—that remain in tense interplay.

The artist would like to acknowledge the generous support and assistance of Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces.