About
Installing Home / 2003, Viewfinder, Whakatū Nelson. 2019. Photograph: Rachael Brown.
Statement
I am drawn to the forensic side of the home and what happens there.
I work across collage, installation, photography, painting and writing, treating domestic material as evidence. I have collected house dust from donors, suspended it in water, and photographed it at monumental scale. I have censored the faces in my childhood photographs. I use wallpaper, fabric, found imagery, and the residue of ordinary rooms.
Faces are withheld. Texts accompany images without explaining them. Rules generate the work: one object removed from a room, one memory recorded incorrectly, one piece of evidence held back.
The work is arranged rather than resolved — a case file assembled from life, offered without a conclusion.
Biography
Catherine Russ keeps house. An artist and writer based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, she treats the home as a site of evidence — dust, laundry, the residue of repeated labour, and the memory such things hold without being asked to. Archivist and witness: the keeper decides what stays.
Her practice spans collage, installation, photography, painting and writing, unified by a sustained investigation of the domestic interior. Her installations have paired photographic archives with handwritten and typed text — Home / 2003, in which sixteen identical landscapes are each overwritten with a fragment of domestic memory, and Looking Out at the View, in which childhood photographs with faces redacted are set against written self-portraits assumed in the voices of other artists and identities.
She holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington. Her writing has appeared in Landfall (Otago University Press), Flash Frontier, Turbine | Kapohau and elsewhere, and was Highly Commended in the 2024 Landfall Essay Competition. She has read her work at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Her work is held in private collections.
Selected Exhibitions
2025 — Other People's Parties, group exhibition, Quiet Dog Gallery, Whakatū Nelson
2020 — Looking Out at the View, solo exhibition, Refinery ArtSpace, Whakatū Nelson
2019 — Home / 2003, solo exhibition, Viewfinder, Whakatū Nelson
2019 — Poetry, group exhibition, g_space Gallery, Whakatū Nelson
2018 — Poetry Lane, group exhibition, Nelson Arts Festival
2016 — Dust Devil, group exhibition, NMIT, Whakatū Nelson
2015 — A Licence to Stare, group exhibition, Marlborough Art Society, Waiharakeke Blenheim
Awards & Recognition
2024 — Landfall Essay Competition, Highly Commended
2013 — Impressions Art Awards, Third Place
2012 — Adam Portrait Award, Touring Finalist (Heard It All Before)
Selected Publications & Readings
Dog Days — essay, published in Strong Words 4, the best of the Landfall Essay Competition (Otago University Press, 2025), accompanied by an original collage
Last One Standing — micro-fiction, Flash Frontier (December 2025)
The Potato Eaters — read at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (2018)
Like Perfume — Turbine | Kapohau (2018)
Of the Woman as a Portrait Artist — International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University (2018)
My Grandmother Louise, Music-box Ballerina — Kiss Me Hardy (2018–2019)
Education
2018 — MA Creative Writing (Distinction), International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington
2017 — Diploma, Writing for Creative Industries, NMIT
2014–2016 — BA Arts and Media, NMIT
Enquiries from curators, galleries and collectors are welcome.