Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums including sculpture and spatial practice, film and performance. She works with the body as material for her practice, and is particularly interested in the physical expression of psychological states, the relationships between bodies and space, and their contingent emotional registers. Acts of cutting, and the resulting fragment or part-object, are often utilised as an editing and performing strategy in the moving image, and as a reductive strategy central to the sculptural process.
Her work seeks to locate experience between stillness and movement, or the place where desire is posited—the edge of movement—and particularly fixes on the liminal body; a body on edge in the landscape. For example, recent video works filmed on location in the clay pans and desert lakes of outback New South Wales present staged performances, unfolding and exploring the relationships between subject and landscape from a (post)colonial perspective. Presented in dialogue with one another, these concentrated and highly contrived scenarios invoke a series of binaries—active/passive, barren/abundant, open/contained, composed/uneasy—that remain in tense interplay.
Cate Consandine's sculptural works may refer to an odd and intriguing moment in Australian art and social history, but they stand alone for their tense, even thrilling formal and material disjuncture…stylish, minimalist timber cabinetry convenes at unusual angles, wrestled from its pragmatic potential to instead create a pure formalist gesture. A sinewy elongated leg, rendered in pink, fleshy wax, distends from the horizontal plane of one piece – awkward and jarring in its lean, unnatural length, proportions and almost frightening realism…
Dan Rule, The Age, November 2015.