Catherine O'Donnell

Hardenvale- Our home in Absurdia is a collabrative project with artists Todd Fuller and Kellie O’Dempsey, it is an immersive installation interrogates life on the fringes of Australian culture and domestic space through a re-recreation of a life-size house. This collabrative work, with Artists Todd Fuller and Kellie O’Dempsey is a sculptural work mimics the architecture of 1960’s Western Sydney Government housing. The façade, windows and venetian blinds invites the audience to cross the threshold into familiar yet uncanny rooms of paper walls, digital screens, drawings, video and found objects. The domestic space is where our earliest memories are housed. This installation invites viewers to become absorbed into consideration of the architecture, while inviting them to delve into their own memories and myths of home.

This playful critique the of the Australian home as myth activates shared cultural experiences through innovation in expanded contemporary drawing and projection. We will contribute directly to culture, community and spirit through innovative approaches to expanded drawing, inclusive community activities, local story telling and performance.

Sirius Topography (series) comprises of 5 large scale Tape installations commissioned by Penrith Regional Gallery for the Ideal Home exhibition, a partnership between the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest.

The Sirius Building was designed to house and improve the lives of the neediest in our community. Yet, all too often social housing developments and their tenants do not receive the same consideration by government as do those in private accommodation, which is evident today, where the Sirius building has been offered for redevelopment for the wealthy.

I have used the underlying symmetry of this iconic building and represented it in terms of order, abstraction, and geometry to elevate it through aesthetic contemplation, so that it contradicts the ordinariness of its existence and allows for at least the possibility of transcendence and a fresh way of seeing this brutalist building.

2168; Estates of Tomorrow is a 20 metree drawing installation commissioned by Casula Powerhouse. O’Donnell was inspired by her childhood home in Liverpool’s Green Valley. O’Donnell faithfully recreates a classic 1960s suburban street scene across 20 metres of Casula Powerhouse’s Upper Turbine Gallery. Building life like representations through her flawless drawings of modernist public housing, O’Donnell highlights the sentimental and utopian roots of an iconic Western Sydney landscape.

These mid-century public housing estates, designed to solve rising population and affordability pressures are now signifiers of lower socio-economic communities across Western Sydney. However, O’Donnell’s drawings allow us to celebrate the overlooked and ordinary with nostalgia and something other than social geography.

This exhibition takes us past the simplistic geometric lines to the emotional impact of the artist’s drawing. Her work provides gentle reminders that the represented forms with an open window, door ajar, and half drawn blinds are homes not houses.

Her close attention to detail invites the viewer to also pay consideration to the nuances of life within and tell-tale signs of occupancy. As ordinary as these urban landscapes may be they are reminders of domestic narratives that glow with care.

Go West, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, 13 October to 3 December 2017 and Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, 7 to 10 September 2017.

Dobell Drawing Biennial; Close to Home Art Gallery of NSW 2016 Curated by Dr Anne Ryan

Inhabited Space 2015-2016 Charcoal on paper and tape Installation dimensions variable

NOW Contemporary Art Prize at Shoalhaven Regional Art Gallery, 2019

I have a keen interest in minimalist structures of architecture, the pictorial power of illusion, scale and perspective and the pursuit of a shared narrative is at the heart of my artistic practice.

Through my drawing practice I examine the urban aesthetics that shape and inform our lives every day and then distil and re-present common place structures such as a front door and windows through my expanded drawing practice. I employ realism 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 to connect through personal experiences and memories to ‘home’.