Zoë Catherine Art

Experiments, February 2026

Experiments, February 2026

Falmouth University MA Fine Art Final Show, July 2025

Body in Space 

Entering the room, I was pulled towards the calmness of the lefthand corner. 

A cocoon I sat in, a clear sight line up to the sky through an arch to the open window… the wind, seagull cries and high street shouts drifted in and surrounded me. 

Sat on the wooden floor, lines, shapes, curves shifted off the walls and ceiling. 

My body floated between them, dancing in colour, a kinetic sculpture in conversation with architecture… a meditation on body in space. 

Meeting In Space 

This room is where people, ideas, and materials meet, 

I am inviting the audience, as they walk in the space to become a kinetic sculpture with me, 

To see, hear, move differently… to experience this intra-action through a continuous shifting lens, 

A lens where embodiment and affect become tangible, where architecture disorientates, where sound is distorted, 

A visual kaleidoscope, unifying the transient and ephemeral, welcoming in the multiple possibilities of how one can know ‘place,’ 

The textiles express how my body wants to move within this space, 

How light, sound, vibrations hum before me, 

The yarn has found its own vocabulary, a clarity that I could not find within the studio, 

It was through an evolving familiarity with the floors, the walls, the ceiling, the windows that has allowed the shapes to arrive,  

The yarn that once interacted with ACP is now in discourse with Belmont House, 

The nails that sat in walls of Love Park, nestle in the skirting boards of Woodlane, 

Valuing these materials as vibrant entities, energetically changing within each space. 

Writings, 2025

Me, The Kinetic Sculpture 

I approach space as an embodied art practitioner. Through somatic listening I situate the Body as a kinetic sculpture in constant dialogue with Itself, Its bodily intelligence, Its bodily knowledge, Its bodily memory within Its environment. 

A sculpture that moves, that makes, that experiments with the haptic quality and materiality of textiles, and how they communicate through on-site installations.  

A culmination of ideas into how I see and experience the world, reflected upon and through the lens of auto-ethnographic self-reflexive prose and poetry.

Writings, 2025

Daily Meeting 

Each day heading to the attic my fingers made contact with the bannisters.  

Bannisters of smooth wood that had been met by many. 

 The slight hiccup,  

where wood met wood,  

guiding my fingers and body upwards.  

My heels and arches catching the metal collar of each step, marking it in the body where it kept a tally. 

 These were my daily touchstones, 

 welcoming me into the space,  

a grounding each morning. 

 Lingering fingers and toes, an ‘active exploratory touch… grasping…object and…its meaning’ (Gibson, 1968:123). 

Writings, 2025

The ‘Other’ Place 

I have always wanted to be somewhere ‘else.’ 

An ‘other’ place, where I could hide away and imagine. 

 My bedroom was up on the fifth floor in a tall house on a 1980’s estate. The buildings all much of the same sameness, the look of suburban respectability. 

I was not quite in the attic, but I had a skylight, a gateway up to the sky, me hovering above the neighbour’s treetops. 

School and bank holiday weekends I would race up to the top of cottages, old castle ruins, climbing frames. Up, up, up, let me float up away from the ground. Let me visit the ‘other’ place again.

Writings, 2025

The Artist 

I am in the centre,  

a kinetic sculpture, 

a kinetic sculpture always in motion,  

embodying memory, knowledge, 

in constant communication and dialogue with space, 

my body is the touchstone,  

an archive,  

cataloguing all that it encounters, 

textiles, both follow and guide me,  

a visual marker,  

a residue humming, 

 speaking to my journey up and beyond this point, 

 discovering voices that remain from others  

and how they find one another

‘Test Space,’ Arts Centre Penryn, May 2025

I begin with the idea of an anchor 

An anchor for this work takes many forms…as the organ…as sound…through people…textile….yarn…and movement 

The organ called immediately, a beautiful touchstone, the heart of the church. A tool to unify worshippers to ‘sing all…sing lustily’ as John Wesley wrote in 1761’s ‘Directions for Singing’¹ 

How could I use this instrument, work with the pipes, the pedals, the structure, the history, the music that stretched, filled out this space and lead so many in song 

I delved into the construction and functioning of an organ, spoke to my mother, a pianist, a teacher, of how the choreography of the hands and feet occupy and perform this energetic presence in this room 

I pictured it bound, yarn weaving and threading through pipes, detailing notes, octaves, rhythms, music, the focus of the piece… the organ alone 

I visited Truro Cathedral…listened to the organ…listened to the choir  

What moved me was not the sound expelled through air and metal pipes 

But the air from the diaphragm, the ribcage, a body 

The individual voice that anchors the space 

Sound and Affect 

Affect and Sound 

My body was affected by that lone voice 

It brings me back to the organ 

Not the beauty in its visage, the gold painted pipes 

I travel around, following its wooden shell towards the window, to E.D 

E.D of 1922…1923…1924 

So inscribed, a document of a person, the individual of many individuals who were a part of this chapel, this community 

And here we are a hundred years later, a community 

A community of artists, of students, of a town with an arts centre dedicated to its community- it’s weekly classes now residing in its new School Rooms, where artists now occupy their new studios, the newness, the space for potential…. Exhibits for ‘Women of Cornwall’ ….for ‘Test Space’ 

A meeting for us as MA students, after ‘Manifesto’ to develop and trial new ideas 

The majesty and grandness of this space is enlivened by those that engage with it 

Sound now becomes Voice 

The voices that were here 

The voices that are here 

The voices that will be here 

In the words of Salome Voegelin ‘I hand my body to it’s force’² 

…How could I find a visual language to represent these voices? 

These voices from history, that sang and celebrated together, that travelled through this space 

The voices that bounced around whilst we sat in the pews, walked these aisles, navigated those steps 

What of the building’s voice, that reached and reaches out to the houses… the people… the land around it 

There is a dynamic presence that occupies this space 

It does not sit stationary by the organ- there is an explosion 

The Yarn is this explosion 

It’s colours speaking to the stained glass, the painted pipes 

Reaching out to the pews where all had a sight line 

All a part of this collective 

Us now are the collective, all with roles to produce this exhibition, I in conversation with Curators, Marketing and ACP….our works calling to each other… 

The yarn visibly connecting and in dialogue with the works in the space.  

Amber, her yarn…the jumpers, stories of community, of fishing, their patterns a knitted connection to their homes… and washing line poles reaching out to the pews….their domesticity speaking to the curtain hoops attached to the organ….linking the yarn….stretching as a canopy across the space 

The yarn and it’s shape in dialogue with the ribbons of Sarah’s, joined to the plaits binding the organ columns….These plaits, my own style under a cap walking and running through Penryn mirrored by those in Sunday best sitting in the pews…their metallic hue speaking to the copper of Vicky’s… the wool never completely still communicating to the slight movement of Dan’s photography 

The yarn hovering above fishing wire…textiles…painting…sculpture…interacting and becoming vitalised by the space, objects and people within it 

Thomas Fuchs speaks of the body’s experience as ‘an invisible network which relates us to things and to people’³ 

The yarn is this network, but it does not live in isolation. It is a connection to a past, a present and a future, it has a vitality 

It has a resonance and capacity to be affected and be vitalised by it’s presence here. 

It’s colours wrapped around cones sits at the feet, by the pedals of the organ 

Cooking….being energised by this chapel 

The loudness, the public facing, the outward space is here 

Where voices, and thoughts and hands interacted, and interact 

Where bodies meet and walk 

The very movement of installation, the pacing back and forth…To sit and study and imagine how these lines could sit in this space…A far reach from a clothing rail in the studio, short strands connected to stools, to looms, to books 

The Choreography of the Make 

The yarn is knotted onto a loop…a pew it’s destination 

The cone drops in front of the organ…reclaimed by walking via steps and doors to the right and left… 

The cone placed on top of my index finger….the other hand feeding the wool, as I walk further and further 

My footsteps echoing as I walk around the balcony…then sit and attach… wool stretched and tied to the handles at the end of each pew…once for hat, gloves, books and papers 

I’m sitting where other feet and bodies have tread 

I’m interacting with the pews where others have sat 

My echo, speaks to their echoes, a cacophony of bodily presence  

There was concern that I was limiting my practice….but this material has a presence…how it feels on my fingers, how it helps me embody and connect with the space 

How like Chiharu Shiota⁴ and Shane Waltener⁵ I am bringing expression and new meaning to an environment 

This canopy of yarn is how I imagined…but it is the two enclaves, the companions sitting either side of the organ that has spoken to me the most 

These are spaces of contemplation 

The yarn reaching out towards the windows, to bedrooms, to homes, to the people 

The lightbulbs, the chair in the window, the human interaction, the quietness in this space 

It is a space of reflection, the softness of the colours, interplaying with the light, the curve of the windows, a cocoon 

I feel a quietness here, a place to be more inward, to listen 

As I move forward…forward towards the Final Show and beyond, it is the quietness of these two enclaves… the intimacy that speaks to me. 

The closeness and immediacy of this yarn, brings you closer to your own body, how your body is embodying the space…encouraging you to see your environment from a different perspective 

This piece is called Dialogue Between Body, Object, Space 

On Elgar’s Concerto, the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason writes ‘It is never fixed in me…a restless, churning, growing thing’⁶ 

And this is how I feel in space….there’s forever a shifting current that is always present 

A current greeting me each time I’ve entered the chapel 

Manifesto Exhibition April 2025

…Listen…
…Listen…
…Keep Listening…
…Listen to What Your Body is Telling You
…Listen to How it is Calling You
…Listen, be Curious to What and Who is Around You
…Listen, but do Not be Passive
…Listen, be Active, Learn and Respond
…Listen, be Patient, you will Find the Words
…Listen, be Open, an Answer is Not always the
Destination…
…Listen…
…Listen…
…Keep Listening…

Imaginings in the Studio December 2024