About
Bio
Catherine Walker is a multidisciplinary feminist artist using the languages of painting, textile, and installation to deconstruct gendered, psycho-social mechanisms of control. Walker employs familial evangelical histories and memory as a lens for interrogating ideologies, hierarchies, and binary gender performance. As an educator, Catherine has worked with young artists in New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, and New Orleans public schools. Catherine holds a Master of Arts from NYU Steinhardt, Department of Art and Art Professions and a Master of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown in New York, Chicago, Washington, DC, Houston, and New Orleans.
Artist Statement
Download CV (PDF)Deep authentic desire, joy, and pleasure are powerful forces, feared by patriarchal and supremacist societies. Ideologies, and systems set up to support these ideologies, attempt to suppress these feelings and the power that comes with their embodiment. I was raised as a pastor's daughter in the southern evangelical church. The paintings and installation work I make emerge from a need to process and break through these particular psycho-social confines — metaphorical walls created by a manufactured need for women’s physical, emotional, and ideological protection. My work embodies a sense of fluidity and movement. What does it look like for a soul to break through and beyond a mandated “protective” barrier, creating its own new topography of freedom and strength? What does it feel like to be immersed in joy and pleasure? It is visually loud and pink, evoking a sense of ecstatic relief that comes when distended tension can no longer be contained, and the fabric of control finally disintegrates. The dance of breaking a barrier is fraught with conflict and paradox. Juxtapositions in my work assert this ambivalence. It seeks attention, but also guards itself. It incites visceral feelings of both discomfort and pleasure.