Participation > Collaborators > Annie Cattrell

Annie Cattrell was born in Glasgow and studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art, University of Ulster and at the Royal College of Art. She is currently Senior Research Fellow in Sculpture at De Montfort University in Leicester and has recently completed an RSA Residency for Scotland based in Stromness, hosted by the Pier Arts Centre. During this time she worked in part with scientists from Heriot-Watt University who are involved with research into renewable energy using wave power. Cattrell’s recent solo exhibitions include: Fathom, The Pier Arts Centre, (Stromness); Anne Faggionato Gallery (London), The Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution (London) and Berwick Gymnasium Gallery, Berwick upon Tweed.

She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally including: Medicine and Art (imaging the future for life and love) Mori Museum, Tokyo; Out of the Ordinary, V&A Museum, London; Hybrid, MIC Auckland; Not Nothing, curated by MUKA, Antwerp; Invisible Worlds, Freiburg Kunstverein, Germany; The Body, Art and Science, National Museum, Stockholm; Einfach Complex, Museum Gestaltung, Zurich; Paper Cuts, Fredericke Taylor Gallery, New York.

The artist’s work is owned by The Wellcome Trust; McManus Art Gallery and Museum, Dundee; Aberdeen Art Gallery; City Art Centre, Edinburgh and is in many private collections. In 2008 she jointly won the international Bombay Sapphire prize.

Cattrell has recently undertaken a number of commissions including the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail and the award winning Bio-chemistry Department at Oxford University designed by Hawkins Brown. She has completed residencies at Camden Arts Centre; The Royal Institution of Great Britain; The Royal Edinburgh Hospital; ACE Helen Chadwick Fellowship at Oxford University and at the British School at Rome. She has been a tutor at the Royal College of Art since 2000 and has lectured in many art colleges in the UK including: Edinburgh College of Art, Central St Martins, University of Gloucester, University of Ulster. She is currently external examiner in Sculpture at the University of Newcastle.

Cattrell’s practice as a fine artist is at times informed by working with specialists in neuroscience, meteorology, engineering, psychiatry and the history of science. This cross-disciplinary approach has enabled her to learn about cutting edge research and gain in-depth information in these fields. She is particularly interested in the parallels and connections that can be drawn within these approaches in both art and science.

She employs a range of research and material strategies in order to make visible, in her work, the subtle changes and transformations continuously taking place inside the human body and brain, and also such seemingly imperceptible shifts in the natural environment. These have included Sense (where FMRI scans of the active areas within the brain relating to the five senses are translated into three dimensions) and Conditions (subsurface etched glass cubes of twelve months of cloud formation above London).

Using ‘state of the art’ technology, for example, topographical Lydar laser scanning and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging body scanning techniques (FMRI), provides her with practical and conceptual insight into what is habitually experienced but not seen or noticed.

The re-presentation of this data in the materialised art work (derived in the first instance from physical matter) questions perceptions of reality and reveals the subtleties of our understanding of time and the rhythms of somatic, sensory and evolutionary experience.

www.anniecattrell.com
www.artakt.co.uk
www.dmu.ac.uk
www.wellcomecollection.org
www.pierartscentre.com
www.forestofdean-sculpture.org.uk
www.comingofage.org.uk
www.mori.art.museum