URBAN INTERVENTIONS

Catherine has been exploring different media for intervening in urban spaces, with group urban walks, temporary site installations, performative works and collaborations in environmental protest.

The performance You See Me Seeing You was conceived of to raise awareness of the expanding role of surveillance in London. With increasing numbers of CCTV masts covering public spaces and close to 1 million cameras (in 2022) dispersed across the city, London is one of the most heavily supervised cities in the world. Catherine and Mirei’s performance You See Me Seeing You  took place in a public square with multiple CCTV cameras directed towards the performance space. The characters created in You See Me Seeing You were performing for their audience and the CCTV camera and possibly a human gazing behind the camera lens.

With her project Statues, Catherine explored means of intervening in the public space surrounding the empty plinth – one of these explorations is presented – see the image on the left.

Catherine’s research into surveillance led to investigating the role of mobile phones as tracking devices for data capture and tracking phone owners’ movement through public space. With our phone and internet dependency, we are the willing servants of “surveillance capitalism”, as coined by Shoshana Zuboff. The artworks in My Phone & I illustrate how mobile phones have become embedded into the body and mind of their users. The film 100 TIMES A DAY portrays a person’s cloying over-dependence on their phone app’s messages of soothing reassurance.

Ditch Coal Now, one of Catherine’s environmental actions, is presented here: This collaborative performance, which commemorated the number of persons who die in one year due to inhalation of coal dust, was presented in Whitehall.

SEE URBAN INTERVENTIONS
You See Me Seeing You
Statues
My Phone & I
Ditch Coal Now