Catherine Beaudette was born in Montreal, Quebec and currently divides her time between Toronto, Ontario and Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland. She received an MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1998 and founded Loop Gallery, Toronto in 2000. She has exhibited extensively in Canada and beyond and is a professor at The Ontario College of Art and Design.
I am exploring the relationships between seashore life and seashore communities. The two concepts overlap in this body of work which combines aquatic specimens with human objects discarded along the coast. Each collection of objects or artifacts portrays the site or community where they were found: the house, the store, the barn, Broad Cove, British Harbour, Summerville. The specimens are illustrated in clusters as they appear on each plate taken from the Fieldbook of Seashore Life. Together they suggest a sense of place and of displacement; artifacts are presented as specimens and specimens appear like artifacts.
This work is part of an on-going investigation entitled museum piece which is engaged with the aesthetic tradition of collecting practices as embodied through the accumulation of specimens, artifacts, and their (re)presentations. An amalgam of newer fields like museum studies with more established disciplines like art history and archaeology - my discipline is a hybrid suitable for an artist in the field. My 'travel practice' is reflected in the light and portable materials that I use; specimens and artifacts from the field, watercolours, notebooks, and a bo”te en valise. From Italy to Newfoundland, I travel through collections, archives, textbooks and encyclopedias.
The incarnation of my 'museum' is on the edge; Longshore, Broad Cove, Duntara, Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland is a dead end road. As both an appendage and a body in full, the origin of the museum calls into question its own origins, current state, and future incarnation. Isolated in the middle of the ocean, itself a geographic fragment, the museum attempts to oscillate within a network of critical disciplines. Yet the location is strategic, located en route, half way to 'the continent'. The rendering of forms, from object to paint or specimen to collection, the idea of rendering the past into something concrete, solid, and tangible is an ironic or inherent quality of my work. As a process that both upholds and questions that what it seeks to critically engage; the finite and temporal representation of history, museum piece orbits the many discourses of the critique of material culture. The works that comprise it attempt to navigate the doubling and tripling up of the many ways of thinking about and looking at the world around us.
Catherine Beaudette
This first edition of the Atlantic Basin Project has been made possible by the efforts of members of the Independent Artists Cooperative and its in house collective Rock Can Roll Independent and through the generous support of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council.