Catharine Somerville

Catharine Somerville, works in both Canada and the UK splitting her life between the two countries. Throughout her career she has worked as a painter, printmaker, set designer, graphic designer, and teacher. Catharine took her post graduate diploma at West Dean College /Sussex University, UK in 2009. During this time she travelled to Mexico and participated in a 6 week residency at The Edward James Foundation. This entailed living in Edward James surreal garden, Las Pozas, Xilitla. Somerville’s latest body of work is inspired by gardens, formal, wild and surreal. The importance of a garden as with our planet relies on the care given for it to flourish. “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince. Catharine writes, “Just as we are brought into the limbo of another world by the atmospheric use of colour and brushwork, it is my intention that the work transports the viewer to a place where imagination flows freely. As much as the surface can be called beautiful, it is actually an access point to a deeper, emotional and more visceral understanding of the impermanence of our lives. French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard writes that perhaps it is better to “live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”