Catherine Heard

Catherine Heard
Windsor, Ontario, Canada

STATEMENT

When the pandemic derailed my original plans for an exhibition, I looked through what I had in my studio. Recently I moved into an old house, and the previous owners had left behind a pile of magazines from the 1960s and 1970s. Paging through them, I selected imagery intuitively and found myself gravitating towards pictures of vehicles, product packaging, processed food, architecture, and home furnishings, signifiers of 20th-century middle-class prosperity and, coincidentally, images familiar from my childhood.

I deconstructed the pictures of architecture and furniture into component parts, interspersed them with fragmented images of commercial products, and reassembled them into perverse geometric forms inspired by El Lissitzky’s utopian Proun works from the 1920s. His “project for the affirmation of the new”, looked toward a utopian future. My “Covid Living” series gazes back on the optimism of mid-twentieth-century consumerism with a nostalgic eye.

A note on materials: The backgrounds of the collages are made from Japanese papers: katagami, which is a stencil paper that is made by laminating layers of kozo (mulberry) paper with a glue derived from persimmon juice and smoked to a dark maroon hue; and kiri-ita which is made from thinly shaved paulownia wood. Photographs do not do these papers justice. Katagami paper has a deep velvety surface, and kiri-ita has a moiré sheen that shifts as light moves across its surface. The rich surfaces of these papers contrast the commercially printed papers of the collages.

BIO

Catherine Heard is an interdisciplinary artist working in a wide range of media including textiles, collage, sculpture, and installation. Craft techniques, including collage, are a foil for complex narratives and difficult subject matter, including histories of the body. Heard’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, The Art Gallery of Kamloops, and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Catherine Heard is a professor at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor and is represented by Birch Contemporary Gallery in Toronto.

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