Catherine Parsonage:
ART-O-RAMA 2019

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ART-O-RAMA 2019

28 August –

1 September 2019

Catherine Parsonage’s approach to painting is distinctly flexible, like notes or jottings the works move at different speeds and range beyond the confines of style.  Parsonage fuses the candidly anecdotal with a range of literary references to create allegorical works which function like a corrupt, performed memoir.

For ART-O-RAMA 2019, Parsonage presents a new series of drawings that take the idea of the threshold as their starting point.  A threshold can be a surface, symbol and limit: it traces the edge of something and like skin, it is porous and tingles.  The drawings from this series a fior di pelle are wrapped in Perspex.  They are reminiscent of screens, active surfaces that we touch and slide fingers over, erotically zooming or distractedly scrolling through fugitive instants.

If a body lay on a page

its sloppy bits would seep into the margins,

in the hands of a printer – a professional,

the margins would be cropped.

 

Because wet ink & wet bodies bleed.

 

When limbs, fingers, mouth, eyebrows,

are delicately lifted from the page

there is a trace of them

beneath, a delicious relic.

 

The insensate leaf of paper now blooms,

breathes.

Memories of movements are spun in and out of cotton fibers,

a personality sits squat between its sheets.

 

– Catherine Parsonage, Jan 2018

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