Catherine Reinhart
Catherine Reinhart
20 September to 13 December 2023
Studio 2
Studio Open Days Tuesday & Thursday, 10 am to 2 pm
THE COLLECTIVE MENDING SESSIONS - Saturday, November 18 | 10 am - 1 pm | Drop In/Drop Out
THE COLLECTIVE MENDING SESSIONS - Thursday, November 30 | 10:30 am - 1:30 pm | Registration required at reception
How do we MEND our communities?
How can we reframe care through graciously looking at abandoned textiles?
How can an individual artist map our collective grief and loss?
We tend to our families and communities by providing comfort and care through consistent and repetitive actions. Through fiber art, sculpture, and socially engaged projects with abandoned textiles, artist Catherine Reinhart draws parallels between mending and stitching by hand, and the repetitive nature of domestic and community care. As artist and mother, Catherine is both archivist and field hand, creating studies in the accretion of domestic life and cataloging its labors. Caregiving girds up our society and is based largely on the undervalued labor of women. She gives voice and holds space for stories of repair, loss, and kinship.
During her three month residency, Catherine will produce new works in her Topography of Dwelling series and engage the visitors to Uillinn and the community at large by hosting The Collective Mending Sessions (CMS). CMS is a series of workshops that cultivate care for cloth and community through the meditative practice of slow stitching. During these workshops, visitors are invited to repair an abandoned quilt together as Catherine teaches basic mending and facilitates discussion. These workshops will be held in October and November.
Additionally, the artist plans to do extensive interdisciplinary experimentation into new fiber works, sculptural works and works on paper. Building on her current body of work, Topography of Dwelling, these works will consider themes of home, labor, and loss in juxtaposition with the architectural, the industrial, and the archaeological. They will reflect on her maternal experience, mapping, and familial relationships. Her inquiry is propelled by the question: How can I, as an artist, borrow methods from anthropology to map and archive domestic spaces?
Catherine Reinhart is an interdisciplinary artist living in Ames, IA, U.S.A. She creates fiber work and conducts social practice with abandoned textiles around themes of domestic labor, connection, and care.
Catherine received her BFA in Integrated Studio Arts in 2008 from Iowa State University. In 2012, she completed her MFA in Textiles from the University of Kansas. Her work has been exhibited widely within the United States and internationally. Catherine is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies. She was recently honored as an Iowa Artist Fellow (2020), an Artist-in-Residence at the Terrain Residency (2021) in Springfield, IL, and an inaugural recipient of the Alex Brown Foundation’s Artist-in-Residence in Des Moines, IA (2022).
www.collectivemendingsessions.com
IG: @catherine_reinhart_studio & @collectivemendingsessions
Images above courtesy of the artist.
WCAC acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council and Cork County Council in making these residencies possible.
