catherine hamilton

In 2003 I was diagnosed with severe allergies to the chemicals used in painting and was told that in order to live a semblance of a normal life, I had to quit both painting and my teaching position in an art school. As someone who had invested their entire being in these pursuits, this was something of a shock.

Though vaguely nervous that it might provoke a level of derision from friends and colleagues, I began spending most of my time outdoors, studying plants and birds, and making small representational drawings and notes from my time in the field. I decided to do this for one year, and stay on the outside edges of what I considered to be serious art-making: I posted sketches, species lists, and writing online as a handwritten blog, and began making a number of trips across the United States to learn more about our flora and fauna and efforts to preserve spaces to protect them. By the end of 2003 this blog had accumulated an international following, and I began exhibiting installations of the drawings. I started making larger pieces in ink, having developed a fairly unique technique of laying in linework to produce drawings that almost disappear into the printmaking paper that I use. The body of work from those trips became an elegy both to what I had lost in my life personally and to the precarious state of the conservation lands that I visited across this country.

I am immersed in the quiet act of looking, but am also keenly aware of the violence of the gaze and the inherent preconceptions that often accompany it. While my first few years in this way of working were happily unironic, mine is not a 19th-century mind set.

I am currently exploring the moment of interaction between an animal, whether wild or caged or urbanized, and the gazer. I have two series that I am building from this: a group of drawings of small animals and birds fleeing the viewer, and another of scaled-up drawings of animals that are directly confrontational. I use perspectival distortion and photographic warping in my drawings, and try to subtly vary the amount of anthropomorphizing from one image to the next.

I am also increasingly interested in contrasting the emptiness of ‘paper space’ against images with drawn and layered space: a mostly-blank oversized sheet with a bird in flight might sit next to a tiny, densely-woven landscape. Hopefully, when the drawings are installed together, there will be a sort of shimmering play in spatial perception and recognition of imagery that will spark questions not only of our relationships to the depicted subject matter but also about our attitudes towards seemingly straightforward representation.