Thinkspace Gallery just posted this interview with Catherine Brooks. It’s a great intimate and personal portrait of an extremely talented lady. Read more about how her works “feel completely unfamiliar” to her when they are finished.

Her upcoming show at Thinkspace Gallery that opens on July 10th has the grandiose title: “The Seeded Wind And Silent Motion; An Oeuvre Of Beetled Beauty”. Below is the artist’s explanation, in her own words, of how she settled on the title for her show.

“I felt a little brave giving my show such a wordy complicated title, but that is exactly what i wanted it to be. Most often the show titles seek to reinforce the mood or narrative in the body of work, some hint of the feelings or physics in the universe we unfold for the viewer. I wanted it to describe the creative space my work was conceived in.

This title has a very literal meaning for me and for you I’ll bare open it’s meaning. I should first mention that all my analogies of life tend to be nature based, I was raised in an all female landscape business that was founded and run by my mother, for years we shared generations of stories over the tops of the flowers we cared for. Those ecosystems provided a framework and context to talk about the more complicated parts of life. That is where my imagery comes from. The concept of the seeded wind comes from the idea of pregnant creative whims.

You can work in your garden never noticing that a plant has volunteered and grown tall right in front of you, it's your garden, and you define what is a weed and no one else.

So much of life is chance, every moment is a freeze frame full of things free falling, ungerminated, but an instant from their realization. Beetles and insects have a primal role in the health of a garden, they germinate flowers, transport seeds, and compost the soil. Before bees had evolved, there were beetles.

Magnolia trees for instance evolved to be pollinated by beetles. I have always viewed them as workers silently making something without protest or the need to communicate their intentions just existing and making. Making work for me is not often an active intentional thing, I constantly feel like some one else made it. The works feel completely unfamiliar when I am finished with them.

After the years of “beetling away” in my studio i have grown to associate the image of the beetles in my work as the hand of the artist. It represents the aspect of myself that's unfamiliar to and independent from my social construct.”

Read Thinkspace’s entire interview with Catherine Brooks on their blog here…

Peep more photos of the upcoming show here…
 

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