Rachel Cattle's drawings and films of places, objects and people attempt to re-inhabit and somehow explain emotional states or a feeling. The act of pencil drawing and its associations with learning to draw when young is as integral to her practice as is the subject matter. 'The immediacy of drawing... brings her closer to the moments and feelings that she pursues, whether they belong to a place she visited as a teenager, a particular frame within a horror film, a scene from a fairytale, or a piece of music.'1
Cattle uses songs and their associations with memory as a background to her drawings and as the soundtrack to her films. Often drawing at night, accompanied by music, sometimes the drawings are an attempt to express a specific idea.
At other times, her obsessive mark making results in very black drawings where something less explicit (more subconscious?) emerges from the darkness to take on a life of its own. Likewise, her film and comic book collaborations with Steve Richards grew out of shared filmic recollections and the same desire to link to emotional responses and memory and to communicate something in an immediate way whilst eschewing a fixed narrative.
Paul Stone, 2008
1. Robert Lowe, I am not I: pity the tale of me, Axis Curated selection
find out more about this artist
find out more about Paul Stone
