Cathryn Boch
N 48° 51’ 47’’ E 2° 21’ 24’’from September 7 to October 19 - 2013
printN 48° 51â 47ââ
E 2° 21â 24ââ
7 septembre â 20 octobre 2013
What is location? Is it a site? Which would be ours? Cathryn Boch is tracing this notion of site and location. She stitches, sews in and on paper. And we can find printed space: maps, plans, photography, with its codifications, its graphic landmarks, signifying expression as well as carefully measured extension. Sewing signifies for Cathryn Boch to turn on the motor of the sewing machine to penetrate the support with exuberance. The string accelerates, taking curves in a stride, the artist marks the paper with a tightly weaved path. The material is being restricted more and more until it turns into something new, somehow liberated from its former habitual condition. The paper accuses and keeps this imprint of the string. Once the movement has stopped, the newly traced image releases a thousand possibilities to breach: An itinerary is opening up, stalled by a reserve, by a white colour, a void, a web of strings. The eye travels through the image when the ensemble proposes surprising apertures.
There are parts where the sewing is particularly dense, confining the motif of the curvature and developing an haut-relief, material superposing each other to create a volume â or gaps as well, when the material surrenders and fades.
Yes the edges, because the corporeal body is so much occupied and attacked that the human anatomy can be a kind of cartography. Some high-tension lines that Cathryn Boch presses in the project of all boundaries. That's difficult to say if they fix, if they heal or if they impede. Whatever it is, the area that they form and draw in the very space of the space representation (the plan) is more immense than it, because it's tangible.
Physical, so powerful.
Somewhere else, but very close in the time of her research, Cathryn Boch imposes another treatment to the representations. She chooses among all the pictures that the newspapers press constantly on our eyes, subjects that touch her. Then she puts sugar on them. Technically, it means that she submits these images to a series of states, runny, glazing, rinsing, returns and dryings skilfully alternated, which without ripping the paper, they cover gradually the image of a selective jamming, and get an important part of its content out of the vision. We don't know what we must see any more, with this set silence. Some things very hard even unbearable, the alchemy of this intervention make enigmatic and hazy fragments, without any context, pleasant for the eye. Even if it isn't totally conscious, by the vision of this comfort we are submit to a real white magic, which reconciles with the intolerable.
Sugar and cotton have common characteristics â by the way, they can be the same, "the sugar thread", so difficult to have, a translucent line, so delicate and independent. Both of them have an extraordinary malleability, as if we can do almost everything with them: sometimes imperceptible, another time so dense. They can break as much as they can restrain. Consequently, there is more continuity than antagonism when Cathryn Boch uses these two materials in her works. The reunion of disparate elements of time, old stratified drawings, sanded so hardly that they can be merged to form just one, go hand in hand with the alloy of transparency in her "sugary glasses". The material proposition of these two parallel aesthetics is only one, just like the thread in the front, and the one in the back of the sewing machine. We can find at the bottom of all these mural overhangings, some little houses which underline in a different way this cohesion. Their situation in the space means that the first site of mind and work is a real inner tension towards balance, in a safe place, somewhere.