Catherine Walker is an artist and teaching artist, based in New Orleans, with a background in design. Her work references feminine identity and experience, and the internalization of feminine aesthetics. Catherine works mostly in acrylic paint and mixed media. She holds a Master of Arts from NYU Steinhardt, Department of Art and Art Professions, and her paintings have been shown in New York, Washington, DC and New Orleans. Committed to empowering marginalized youth through art education, Catherine has worked with young artists in New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, and New Orleans public schools. She is currently co-founding a program called Sketch Basin (www.sketchbasin.org, @sketchbasin), which provides half day, advanced art instruction and portfolio development to students in New Orleans’ non-selective charter high schools.

Statement
Catherine’s work activates material and process to explore the performative aspects of feminine identity formation and ideals. Her process requires water to be its own conductor and boundary simultaneously through surface tension. Spaces of wet unprimed canvas carry the flow of diluted pigment. The paint’s movement is also controlled, however, and prevented from crossing into a dry field without significant force. If the paint does break a boundary, tiny, irregular fields of color scatter across the dry surface. By utilizing degrees of improvisation in her decisions, Catherine works to connect with a facet of human experience and feminine energy that is fluid rather than logical or predictable, mimicking a slow, non-linear identity investigation. What presents outwardly from this interior process is a form that is malleable and evolving; the result of transformation through alternating assimilation and resistance to outside influences.