Catherine Mcguiness & Diane Pirotta

Catherine: I am a fearless and frenzied creative. In any one of my pieces, a hundred marks and overlaps sit beneath my signature. In painting, Catherine is constantly scraping, wiping out, and flooding the canvas with colour. On the page, I uses acrylic and Posca to draw shimmering webs of dots and lines. Sometimes a bird or bridge takes shape – other times, I give myself over completely to abstraction. My involvement in Love owls and mermaids singing in the rainbow pop (2020), a largescale mural for the Art Gallery of NSW, was a major coup as an emerging artist. Diane Pirotta: My art practice is multidisciplinary, with works on canvas, wood, paper or skins. I am a possum skin cloak maker using a traditional herringbone stitch to sew the skins together, and burn the stories onto the skins with pyrography. My paintings and drawings are acrylic, charcoal, watercolour or inks and my sculptures are made of hebel, with stained glass mosaic. My weaving materials are grown in my home garden and foraged locally so I always have access to natural materials. My artwork is more cultural than contemporary.

Catherine’s textile work is made in collaboration with Diane. Both in idea and process. Diane shared stories about local wildlife including possums and Catherine found her own connection describing how her parents always called her their little possum’. And so was born a series of animal inspired textile portraits featuring Catherine’s graphics and sparkly embellishments with Diane’s stitched leathers and skins. Following the Rylstone based residency the two artists kept their textile conversation going by posting the work between Sydney and Kandos.