Cathy Carter - Breath of Time

Cathy Cater’s new exhibition A breath of Time was born out of her recent experience at the Nocefresca artist residency in Sardegna and explores both the impact and appeal of tourism, along the coastline. Her new series employs intricate digital collaging techniques, to create highly constructed worlds of 'hyper reality' which explore our relationship to bodies of water as unique environmental, physical and cultural landscapes.


Un Soffio di Tempo /A Breath of Time /
Artist Statement – Carter

This body of work was born in the sun-soaked stillness of Milis, Sardegna—under orange groves and the scretch of swallows darting overhead, beside ancient olive trees that breath history and silence. It is a response to time—folded, stretched, paused—and to places where the sea meets the land in delicate, threatened equilibrium. During an international artist residency at Noce Fresca, Carter explored and recorded the Italian beach culture and coastal forms of Sicilia and Sardegna.

Drawn to the coastlines and their liminal magic—Scala dei Turchi’s meringue cliffs, quartz beaches, turquoise seas and rocky thresholds—Carter observed with awe and unease, photographing sites repeatedly. These works have been made using sites that have been sculpted by geological patience and that now thrum with the restless footsteps of desire. The tourist’s gaze has become a tide that swells with the summer months. What is left behind is beauty fraying at the edges.

Un Soffio di Tempo is a breath, a squizz, a layered act of seeing. Shooting, assembling, manipulating—these images utilise repetition, shifting scale, focus, and kaleidoscopic construction to let time slip loose from its hinges. Figures drift like weird fishes across invented seas. Pavlova cliffs sprout miniature humans, crawling like ants across delicate white sediment.

Water, ever a metaphor, becomes a mirror. A space of origin and undoing. The sea—primordial and planetary—pulls at something deep in the blood. As scholar-poet Teresa Teaiwa writes, “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know the ocean is really in our blood.” These works speak to that biological memory, and the anxiety of its loss.

We are in the Anthropocene, the era of witnessing. Through hyperreal constructs and digital alchemy, these images trace the emotional weather of living on a changing planet. They are dreamlike maps of our dislocation, attempts to imagine new ways of seeing, feeling, belonging. A breath of time is also a breath of reckoning—an invitation to reconsider our position in the changing tide.