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Sach Catts

Chop Dig Chanty | 2017

2. Sach Catts, Mark Shorter, 'Chop Dig Chanty' photo
2. Sach Catts, Mark Shorter, 'Chop Dig Chanty' photo

bio:

Sach (Alexander) Catts is a Sydney-based artist and occasional writer, practising since 2006. He has exhibited widely across Sydney and in New Zealand. Catts completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2014 at Sydney College of the Arts. Catts has written articles and catalogue essays for exhibitions in both Australia and New Zealand. From 2012–15 he was a director of the online journal Runway: Australian Experimental Art and was a contributor to the Runway blog. Since 2014 Catts has been a resident artist at 55 Sydenham Road in Marrickville, Sydney.

"Chop Dig Chanty" 2017

Chop Dig Chanty is a performance work that seeks to compose a chanty (work song) through the labour of chopping and digging. Over the course of three days Catts and Shorter will fell and chop up a tree, and dig a hole respectively. As the axe chips the wood and the shovel carves the soil, rhythms between the two actions will be found and employed to divide and organise the timber and to propel the excavation downward. Performance throughout the day

statement:

Sach Catts’s practice borrows methodologies and epistemologies from a range of disciplines. He has drawn upon practices from street BMX, bicycle maintenance, the construction industry, bodybuilding and fitness training. Much of this work has been performance-based and involves duration, endurance and sweat. Considerations of ‘work’ are an ongoing preoccupation. More recently his work has come to explore the design parameters of contemporary torture practices through an ongoing sculptural series of ‘waterboards’ – torture apparatuses rendered through modernist and contemporary design idioms.

Materials | Performance
Location | Paul’s Paddock
1. Sach Catts, Mark Shorter, 'Chop Dig Chanty' photo Alex Wisser
1. Sach Catts, Mark Shorter, 'Chop Dig Chanty' photo Alex Wisser