Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
De Montfort University
FATHOM - a solo show at the Pier Art Centre (2010) with catalogue and essay by Professor Steven Connor. Fathom toured to Timespan (Sutherland) and Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. Additionally Cape Farewell invited Cattrell to join and contribute to the Scotland’s Islands expedition (2011) and exhibit new artworks commissioned for Carbon12 at the EDF Foundation in Paris (2012).
This research investigates the possibilities and paradoxes of how combining the representation of specific state of the art scientific and technological data and methodological approaches with material and philosophical artistic practice (drawing and sculpture) can potentially bring new perceptual understandings and balances between the aesthetic, empirical, predictive, insightful and poetic.
Cattrell’s methodology makes use of technologies measuring the sea, the landscape and the interior of the human body to try to capture their vicissitudes in art. She visited libraries and museums, including the Kirkwall Library (Murdo Mackenzie Admirality maps), the anatomical specimens at Gordon Museum in Guy’s Hospital and the innovative predictive writings by George Mackay Brown such as Greenvoe to gather historical information.
Cattrell worked closely with Prof Morten L. Kringelbach observing neurosurgery at the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. During a residency (Pier Art Centre, Orkney, funded by the RSA and Creative Scotland) she talked to Dr Mike Bell at the world leading ICIT (International Centre for Island Technology, Herriot Watt University). ICIT uses new technologies and data information to enable their researchers to digitally map the hydrodynamics of the wave and tidal energy around the Orkneys for the purpose of renewable energy development. It is the Scottish Government Policy to generate the equivalent of 100% of Scotland's gross annual electricity consumption by 2020 using renewable energy technologies.
Following the residency, the artworks produced and some additional existing sculptures (following the same line of research enquiry) were exhibited in a solo show called Fathom at the Pier Art Centre (2010) with catalogue and essay by Professor Steven Connor. In 2012 Fathom toured to Timespan (Sutherland) and Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. Additionally Cape Farewell invited Cattrell to join and contribute to the Scotland’s Islands expedition (2011) and exhibit new artworks commissioned for Carbon12 at the EDF Foundation in Paris (2012).