Episode 150 - Catherine O'Donnell - exploring the beauty of the ordinary and the uncelebrated

Thanks to Catherine O'Donnell for speaking to us in her lunchbreak from teaching at the National Art School. We spoke to Catherine about her drawing practice, coming to art later in life, judging an art prize, and her love of the fibro shack! 

She has an exhibition coming up at Campbelltown Arts Centre in July and at Dominik Mersch in August. 

'Essentially my artist practice is about the beauty of the uncelebrated and ordinary.

My drawings an exploration of the architecture, culture and history in the everyday-ness of the urban environment. I see the suburbs as full of connection and disconnection, sameness and difference; in short, my drawings examine suburban living as a site of complexity. I am particularly interested in the way that the vernacular architecture and general street scapes of the places we regularly inhabit become recessed into our minds like wallpaper -they are at once visible and invisible.

It is the architecture of the suburban landscape which is the subject in my drawings. The absence of the representation of people in the drawings encourages viewers to consider the architecture from their own view point, perhaps igniting their own memories of suburban living. My drawings whilst uninhabited still capture traces of human intervention with narrative elements embedded in the commonplace structures: an open window; a door ajar.

My drawings are clearly representational but the realism in my work is not merely a reproduction of the visible. It is the elevation of the abstract form, the underpinning geometry and the distillation of the spatial composition that interests me. To this end I extract the building from its surroundings, deleting extraneous information, in order to emphasize the simplified form and obtain the final image. I use representation as a catalyst to ignite the imagination of the viewer and invite them to look beyond the mundane and banal. To revisit these spaces imaginatively and find the aesthetic poetry embedded within in the suburban landscape, while at the same time disrupting cultural prejudices which prevent people from seeing the underlying elegance of these simple buildings.'