CATHERINE BEAUDETTE - statement

I like to think of my work as a ‘museum’ of fossils or traces. It is engaged with the aesthetic tradition of collecting practices as embodied through the accumulation of specimens, artifacts, and their (re)presentations. An amalgam of newer fields like museum studies and visual culture with more established fields like art history and archaeology- my discipline is a hybrid suitable for artist in the field.  From Italy to Newfoundland, I have traveled through collections, archives, textbooks, and encyclopedias.

 The incarnation of my ‘museum’ is on the edge; Longshore, Broad Cove, Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland is a dead end road.  As both an appendage and a body in full, the origin of the museum calls into question its own origins, current state, and future incarnation. Isolated in the middle of the ocean, itself a geographic fragment, the museum attempts to oscillate within a network of critical disciplines. Yet the location is strategic, located en route, half way to ‘the continent’. The rendering of forms, from object to paint or specimen to collection, the idea of rendering the past into something concrete, solid, and tangible is an ironic or inherent quality of my work. As a process that both upholds and questions that what it seeks to critically engage; the finite and temporal representation of history, my ‘museum’ orbits the many discourses of the critique of material culture.  The works that comprise it attempt to navigate the doubling and tripling up of the many ways of thinking about and looking at the world around us.

The series entitled Mushrooming explores the overlap between early civilizations and the nature that inspired them.  In these paintings, Etruscan artifacts float in layers of organic form, primarily shells and mushrooms. The sacred geometry embedded in the shell is repeated in crafts like weaving and ceramics, and systems like architecture and urban planning. Mushrooms extract nutrients from decaying matter; as metaphors they are like the stratification of the civilizations that develop on top of each other. They  are the cycle of life and death that connects us to the past and to our roots in the natural world.  Mushrooming implies synergy: overlap, connectedness and potential.

Beaudette was born in Montréal, Québec and currently divides her time between Toronto, Ontario and Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland. Her practice stems from both places where she collects artifacts and specimens to form the basis of her drawings, paintings and installations. Catherine studied painting in Toronto and Florence, Italy and has exhibited her work in Canada since the mid 80’s.  In 1998 she received an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Catherine is the founder of Loop Gallery in Toronto’s Queen West Gallery District where she continues her involvement with the local art community.  Catherine is an associate professor at The Ontario College of Art and Design.

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Art Work