TONIGHT! EXHIBITION OPENING
As the saying goes, red skies can signal good or bad weather: in the morning, they are a “shepherds’ warning,” while at night, they forecast “sailors’ delight.” Continuing the artist’s fascination with sky-watching, Catherine Woo’s new paintings are vivid firmaments of billowing magentas, oranges and maroon. Her “grand, amorphous and ambiguous” works capture the brilliant red hues that slip into both “delight” and “warning”; are they beautiful sunsets or skies tainted by bushfire? Woo understands that the sublime moment often contains both awe and terror.
CATHERINE WOO
SIGNS OF PROGRESS
📅 Opening: Wednesday, 28 August, 6-8PM.
📍 ARC ONE Gallery
All welcome.
Email mail@arc1gallery.com or DM us for a catalogue of available works.
CATHERINE WOO Commission at Merinda Park Station Now Open
CATHERINE WOO's stunning commission for Merinda Park Station, Cranbourne is now open.
The Merinda Park Station stands on the site of a pre-colonial marshland, and Woo's artwork 'Reflections', places the memory of water overhead. As Woo writes, the installation recalls 'patterns created by water droplets, or the undulations created around moving reeds or trees that once flourished in the wetland.'
SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY 2022
Welcome to ARC ONE at SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY
From today will be showing a selection of major artworks from some of Australia's most significant contemporary practitioners, including PAT BRASSINGTON, LYNDELL BROWN / CHARLES GREEN, PETER DAVERINGTON, MURRAY FREDERICKS, JANET LAURENCE, HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, DANI MARTI, JULIE RRAP, IMANTS TILLERS, GUAN WEI, CATHERINE WOO, and JOHN YOUNG. We are also proud to be presenting, for the first time, the work of internationally acclaimed artist DESMOND LAZARO.
Our booth is showcasing brand new artworks, alongside some of the most iconic works from ARC ONE Gallery, in celebration of these artists and their significant contribution to contemporary art in this country.
CATHERINE WOO interviewed on The Art Show
A fantastic interview with CATHERINE WOO aired on The Art Show with Rosa Ellen last Wednesday 17 August.
"Enter the studio of nipaluna Hobart-based artist Catherine Woo, whose textural landscape paintings using natural minerals and elemental forces, show nature from a completely different perspective."
Have a listen through the link in our bio!
CYRUS TANG Interviewed by Vault Art Magazine
Beautiful images of CATHERINE WOO in her studio captured by Vault Art Magazine in their interview.
To see more of Catherine's captivating works contact us at mail@arc1gallery.com
CATHERINE WOO wins The Hadley's Art Prize Packing Room Prize
Catherine Woo, A Moment in the Day, 2022, Mixed media on aluminium, 120 x 120cm.
We are thrilled to announce that CATHERINE WOO has won The Hadley's Art Prize packing room prize with her mixed media on aluminium work 'A Moment in the Day'.
“The work aims to evoke a particular quality of light that occurs in the landscape. Scattered sunlight – reflected and iridescent: bouncing off rippling water, moving leaves, salt lakes, shards of quartz." - Catherine Woo
Catherine Woo, Current I-IV, 2021, acrylic on aluminium, 183 x 503 cm (overall)
CATHERINE WOO OPENS 'VIBRANT MATTER' AT ARC ONE
A master of the surface and abstraction, Catherine Woo’s striking new body of work is an instinctive and powerful examination of the human connection with the natural world.
Catherine Woo is known for her visually arresting oeuvre of ‘painting with weather’. By using a range of unconventional materials and processes, Woo creates works that are both macro and micro-interpretations of natural phenomena. Her delicate, abstract forms, rendered in intensely detailed surfaces, draw forth various analogies between the body and the environment. In this recent body of work, Woo continues this investigation into the interrelationship between humans and the natural world via layered, undulating and ethereal paintings that examine the complex systems and structures of nature.
In previous works Woo found herself a silent partner to the visualisation of natural forces – vibration, evaporation, reticulation. In this chapter, she is now compelled to make the human element more present by incorporating intimate, hand-painted forms.
Intricate compositions weave together evoking water currents; leaf veins; coral skeletons; pulsing arteries; webs; microscopic snapshots from within the body and formations of earth. In conflating the regions
of the body and the environment, new possibilities are explored where the self is inextricable from the environment that contains it. Drawing the exhibition title from a text by philosopher Jane Bennett, Woo suggests that by seeing ourselves as part of a network of Vibrant Matter, we can begin to think more ecologically:
“Rather than seeing the environment as something ‘outside’, beyond our bodies, these patterns and processes suggest being within it – where our own bodies are part of a larger body, intimately and inextricably linked. It is a kind of visual acknowledgment of our participation in a vast changing body of living matter.” - Catherine Woo, 2021
As Jane Bennett asserts in the text “such a new found attentiveness to matter and its powers will not
solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in the knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened and expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans.” 1
Visually stunning, these extraordinary paintings simultaneously speak to themes of nature, beauty, the body, and geography, while resisting representation in the pursuit of more philosophical concerns.
Catherine Woo graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania in 2013, having also studied at Sydney College of Fine Arts and the ANU School of Art. She has exhibited her work across Australia and internationally since 1997. In 2008 and 2011, Woo was awarded a $20,000 New Work grant by the Australia Council Visual Art Board, and was included in the Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia (2008). In 2010, Woo was curated into an exhibition at the Samstag Museum in Adelaide titled Abstract Nature. She has been a Finalist in the City of Hobart Art Prize in 2002, 2011 and 2012. Her major corporate commissions include: Visy Corp Australia, the Chinese World Trade Centre, Beijing, Shangri-
la Hotel, Beijing; Four Seasons, Hong Kong; and the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Shanghai and Perth. Her work is represented in private and public collections in Australia, including Artbank, Macquarie Bank, and RACV, as well as in the UK and Asia.
1 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 13.
CATHERINE WOO’S FACADE FOR THE RITZ CARLTON
Catherine Woo has created a facade for the newly developed Ritz-Carlton hotel in Perth. Her work titled Cascade was designed to evoke shimmering water, referencing the nearby Swan River and the falling water of the famous Kimberley Gorges of Western Australia.
Woo's original work was scanned into a 3D model and developed at monumental scale using virtual reality technology. Cast in recycled aluminium, the rippling surface comes to life under the changing light of day and creates a powerful physical presence through scale and reflection.
Built by UAP in collaboration with the artist and the construction team at ProBuild.
Photos by Robert Frith - Acorn Photo.
CATHERINE WOO
Catherine Woo, Glimmer (Detail), 2017, mixed media on aluminium, 120 x 120 cm
A master of the surface and abstraction, Catherine Woo’s striking new body of work is the product of an instinctive and powerful alliance with the natural forces that surround us.
For her third solo exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery, Woo continues to explore the mutable boundaries and energies in our relationship with the environment. In these latest works, she employs the concept of the mirage to explore a particular effect of light, at once shimmering and illusory, that dances between real and apparent movement.
Through the application of reflective materials, Woo probes the shifting territory
between what is real (light) and what is manifested in our mind’s eye, effectively highlighting the fluid nature of perception. Drawing on raw materials and natural techniques, the rippled surfaces of her paintings not only evoke the natural world – undulations of water, formations of earth, glistening sand – but are also shaped by it:
“Using a collaborative approach with natural processes and materials – interactions of water, vibration and evaporation giving agency to matter - I am seeking to use process rather than representation to describe this ephemeral quality of light moving in waves; at once trying to capture something in material form whilst acknowledging its essentially elusive quality.” - Catherine Woo, 2017
Woo’s innovative approach to painting is imbued in these remarkable works. Layered and textured, shimmering and ethereal, they simultaneously speak to themes of beauty, nature, and geography, while resisting representation in the pursuit of more philosophical concerns. As with the mirage, they deftly balance between what we know and what we believe we see.
MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO / CATHERINE WOO
MARIA FERNANDA CARDOSO and CATHERINE WOO will be exhibiting in the group exhibition Fieldwork: Artist Encounters, curated by Gary Warner, held at SCA Galleries, Sydney College of the Arts.
The exhibition creates spatial, conceptual, sonic and material conversations between recent works and decade-long practice trajectories. Cardoso's works included in the show impose order on seedpods collected during a camping trip with the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, while Woo forges an evidentiary metallic interface with the coastal geology of Tasmania’s Pirates Bay.
Fieldwork runs from 7 - 30 July 2016.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Gumnuts (detail), 2009, Tartu seeds, metal pins, 245 x 190 x 6cm.
Catherine Woo, Interface, 2016, 20 panels of thin black coated aluminium, pressed and rubbed onto a geographic formation, 240 x 300 cm.
CATHERINE WOO
CATHERINE WOO has been selected as finalist in the 2016 Deakin University Small Sculpture Award with her work Out of the woods. An exhibition with all the finalists' works will be open from 8 June to 15 July at the Deakin University Art Gallery.
Catherine Woo, Out of the woods, perspex, aluminium, glass, wood and pigment, 10 x 10 x 8.6 cm (each).
CATHERINE WOO
Catherine Woo, Heat (Detail), 2015, mixed media on aluminium, 120 x 120 cm.
CATHERINE WOO
INCENDIE
OPENING WEDNESDAY 22 JULY 2015, 6-8PM
Catherine Woo’s latest exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery continues her visually stunning oeuvre of ‘painting with weather’. The title, Incendie, is drawn from the French term for fire, which Woo has used as the axis for exploring themes of fire and heat. Concerned with the inter-relationship between humans, the body and their natural surrounds, Woo’s abstract, topographic and luminescent surfaces are underpinned by a consideration of how our ideologies and senses are shifting in response to climate change and anthropogenic processes on the environment.
At the core of Woo’s practice is her collaboration and experimentation with natural forces. By manipulating the immediate environment around her (namely, redirecting the gutters to allow rainwater seepages and wind into the studio), Woo orchestrates naturally occurring forms onto the aluminium canvas. The resulting works journal this space of negotiation between artist and weather, and as Woo describes, they depict a ‘trace of their alliance’.
The delicate imprints on Woo’s paintings are instantly recognisable as tactile weathered surfaces that form patterns akin to aerial views of landscapes. Substances such as iron, silica, calcium carbonate, mica, pigments and black sand are combined with vibration and evaporation to create a painting system whereby the works self-propagate. For Woo, partly relinquishing control and respecting the agency of materials and the power of their interaction is central to her practice.
Incendie will run from 21 July to 22 August 2015 at ARC ONE Gallery.
CATHERINE WOO
Catherine Woo, Ebb, 2014, mixed media on aluminium, 120 x 120 cm
CATHERINE WOO’s 2014 painting Ebb is selected as finalist for the John Leslie Art Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious non-acquisitive prizes for landscape painting. This year the first prize recipient will be awarded with $20,000, made possible by the generous ongoing support of Gippsland Art Gallery’s long time Patron John Leslie O.B.E.
The opening and announcement of the winners is on Friday 19 September 6pm at the Gippsland Art Gallery and the exhibition is on show until 23 November 2014.
For more information click here.
CATHERINE WOO
CATHERINE WOO is currently exhibiting in Breathe, as part of the City of Sydney Chinese New Year Associated Event, at Art Atrium. Breathe is a group exhibition of women artists with Chinese ancestry, exploring physical and metaphysical ideas of breath and breathing space in their interior and exterior lives.
The exhibition opens Saturday, 28 January and continues until 18 February.
For more information please click here.
CATHERINE WOO's work has also been reviewed in a new book by Jeff Makin, published in November, 2011.
CATHERINE WOO
Congratulations to CATHERINE WOO whose work was HIGHLY COMMENDED in the
The Fleurieu Water Prize 2011.
CATHERINE WOO
CATHERINE WOO has been shortlisted for The Fleurieu Water Prize with her work Salt Lake. The exhibition of finalists will be from 4 November - 5 December at Hardy's Winery, McLaren Vale, South Australia.
For more information click here.
JUSTINE KHAMARA / ROBERT OWEN / CATHERINE WOO / VANILA NETTO / DANI MARTI / IMANTS TILLERS / PETER DAVERINGTON / JASON WING
ARC ONE will be featuring the work of JUSTINE KHAMARA, ROBERT OWEN, CATHERINE WOO, VANILA NETTO, DANI MARTI, IMANTS TILLERS, PETER DAVERINGTON and JASON WING at the 2011 Korea International Art Fair. The fair will go for four days from 22 - 26 September. ARC ONE will be at Stand No. A48.
For more information click here.
CATHERINE WOO / ROBBIE ROWLANDS
Congratulations to CATHERINE WOO and ROBBIE ROWLANDS who have both been Highly Commended in the City of Hobart Art Prize. The City of Hobart Art Prize will be open to the public from Saturday 23 July to Sunday 18 September at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
For more information please click here.
CATHERINE WOO
CATHERINE WOO is part of Primed: Painting Tasmania at the Academy Gallery, University of Tasmania in Launceston from 26 August - 17 October.
For more information, click here.
CATHERINE WOO
CATHERINE WOO is exhibiting as part of Abstract Nature at the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia from 30 July - 8 October.
More information, click here.