CATHERINE CASSIDY
SNAP CRACKLE POP
Australian landscape abstractionist, Catherine Cassidy, presents snap crackle pop.
This latest series of paintings exploring the mark and the field, pushes into new colour territory while simultaneously engaging with the concept of time in painting.
‘It is my privilege and joy, as a landscape painter, to be able to sit in this ancient country, absorb its continuity and grace and think about how I can make images that hold its presence.
What I see, although marked by unfathomable travels through Deep Time always appears as though it is just coming into being.
Just being made anew.
I want to be able to experience this in the images I make.
You look at the painting and there it is.in a state of arrival.
You look again and there it is becoming itself again.
This engagement with what seems a constant state of the present, something in the act of being made, encourages me to chase and work with the big things of landscape …illumination, air, space, energy.
They work to make a matrix that cradles everything together.’
‘I am looking for unity and how underneath appearances lies a foundational state and that relationships connect everything.’
Australian Abstract Amber Creswell Bell Thames and Hudson 2023
snap crackle pop is the sound of the bush underfoot, the crack of rocks splitting in the heat, the lightening bursts of violet, orange, cobalt and ochre that race across the earth and the sky.
“The artists reactions to place are visceral….and prompt a range of unexpectedly ambiguous responses. Cassidy is concerned simultaneously with the intimate and panoramic aspects ….of the landscape. ..Her ’perspectives ‘ are not those of the Western canon but rather constantly changing as she moves through the landscape. This results in images in which multiple viewpoints are the norm and natural motifs… are sometimes broken down to the extent that original identity is purposefully dismantled. The constant presence of this innate ambiguity imbues a finely-tuned aesthetic tension in Cassidy’s images.…and a constant vitality to the whole.”
Peter Haynes Canberra Times 2021
