Föenander Galleries is proud to present Cathy Carter’s Pop Up Exhibition: We are Water

Where:
Gallery Anomalous: 16 Hamilton Road, Waiheke Island

When:
Opening Function: Saturday 4th Feb 6-8pm
Exhibition duration: 4 – 15 February
Viewing times: Sat & Sun 10- 4 pm & Mon – Fri 11- 4pm

At the time of the first European arrivals to Aotearoa, Waiheke was known as Motu-Wai-Heke, “island of trickling waters”.

With an art practice centred on bodies of water Carter’s work has a natural synergy with Waiheke. Her pop up exhibition: We are Water looks to make new connections between bodies of water and our own physical bodies. The origin of human life is believed to have begun in the oceans with single-celled microbes evolving into more complex organisms and today, our bodies form and grow in a liquid womb with 99% of the molecules in our bodies being water. Carter’s work highlights this primordial connection between life and water with belief that water has the ability to heal the mind and body and help you tap into your most calm and creative state of being.

Carter’s work embraces the visceral experience of being immersed in a body of water and provokes seeing as an experience rather than solely as observation. Carter’s practice explores ideas discussed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on ‘being and becoming’ – nothing is in a fixed state; everything is in a process of ‘becoming’. The works in this exhibition investigates these ideas – that we cannot observe without acting upon, that we cannot pin down material reality, rather it only exists in a world of flow where nothing is ever entirely predictable, in which we are all waves of particles, in a continuous process of becoming.

We are Water displays a curiosity for experimentation and an expressive freedom as she navigates between perspective and perception to create emotional intimacy and connection through Carter’s work embodying the ebbs and flow of water. A number of the works in this exhibition seek to subvert our traditional understandings of light, colour and form in spaces of water seeking to establish new relationships and unison between the viewer and water. To achieve this, Carter will often create fictional constructs that explore these liquid spaces and human interaction with them. In so doing she invites the viewer to experience a state of becoming through an encounter with imagined space and time.

Carter graduated from AUT University with holds a Master of Arts in 2013 and has been a regular finalist in a number of leading art awards including: the Parkin Drawing Prize, Molly Morpeth Canaday, Sydney HeadOn Portrait Prize, Wallace Art Awards and the Walker and Hall Prize. Carter’s work is held in a number of distinguished public, private and corporate collections including the NZ Parliamentary Art Collection and Wallace Arts Trust.