Catherine Ross (b. 1991) lives and works in rural Aberdeenshire in the Northeast of Scotland. She works slowly, and usually at a small scale, inching paintings into the world over many months. Ross describes the works in this presentation as having come into focus as ‘a group that seem to read together’ some having been made in recent weeks, others having gestated in the studio for months or even years.
On first encounter the image is not always easy to read. It takes a second or two to get your bearings - mirage-like, ghostly shapes sit within the surface of the paper, others are highly worked, with an encrusted, jewel-like surface. Forms that appear nominally abstract, carefully built-up in layers of gouache and watercolour, or paint, varnish and wax, slowly reveal themselves as, for example, a body of water, a blanket of snowy ground, a towering forest of pine trees, or a thick woolly jumper.
There’s a sense that these works belong to a world of memory, and recollected dreams. A personal encounter with the artist’s past, and her present concerns. An idea of ‘North’, Ross says, is where it all begins. She was born in Yellowknife, the capital (and only) city in the Northwest Territories of Canada, her father a meteorological observer in the high arctic. Formative experiences that stayed with her when the family later relocated to Aberdeenshire, where Ross has lived and worked most of her life since.
As Ross puts it, “My paintings reference an imprint of my childhood experience, and allow me to tap into a kind of inborn alternative existence. As a result, there’s a feeling of being in another dimension. There is some kind of presence there. I think that they show spaces in which time seems to pass more slowly; clearings in the woods or parts of rooms which have just been left.”