Artist Statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across collage, drawing, painting and installation. Throughout my practice, I frequently engage with self-portraiture. My work navigates the intersections of memory, material, and language, often through layered compositions of found imagery and text fragments.

Informed by a background in writing, I incorporate magazines, charcoal, and paint along with other everyday materials to construct pieces that explore narrative and repetition. My process is intuitive and material-led, a negotiation between precision and chance, erasure and accumulation. I aim to create work that feels like fragmented stories, inviting viewers to piece together their own meaning.

Artist Biography

Catherine Russ is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand. Catherine explores the intersections of memory, material, and language, expressed through layered compositions of found imagery and text. Her creative process is guided by her background in writing and is largely material-led. It balances precision with chance, to build works rich in narrative that invite personal interpretation.

Recent Work

Group Exhibition: Other People’s Parties, Quiet Dog Gallery (Whakatū Nelson, 2025).

• Collage Project: a collage practice, producing a new body of work exploring surface, material and fragmentation.

• Publication: Dog Days — essay highly commended in the Landfall Essay Competition, published in Strong Words 4 (Otago University Press, 2025), accompanied by one of my collages.

Education

Catherine holds a Bachelor of Arts & Media, a Diploma in Creative Writing, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing (International Institute of Modern Letters).

Her work is held in private collections.