Vale Cate Consandine

In fallout, Cate’s first exhibition at 200 Gertrude Street, she combined the intimacy of sculptural representations of the body with the monumental scale and structure of architecture.

fallout continued a series of works by Cate which investigated points of intersection between the anxious body and the mediating structures located in the built environment. Exploring forms of agency that both enable and constrain, the artist merged the solid and the transparent, absence and presence, and materiality and ephemerality.

‘I am interested in the jolt, the flash that hits behind the eyes, grips the body with alertness, intent, in the shape of a claw, as the land falls out from underneath...’
– Cate Consandine, exhibition catalogue, 2003.

This body of work was evolved for a presentation at West Space in 2004 with Edging Still. ‘My appliqué is a wet unbroken line, a circle, lipstick pink, which edges like insomnia, and holds in its arena, life still.’
– Cate Consandine, exhibition catalogue, 2004

In 2006, shortly after finishing in the Gertrude Studio Program, Cate was invited to present a major new project Candy Cane (2006) in the Main Gallery at 200 Gertrude Street. 

Curatorial writing on Candy Cane, authored by Kit Wise, continued to be true of Cate's practice:

'Cate Consandine somehow places us moments before this impact. A thick musk of desire permeates the space of the gallery, pheromones linking the works, levelling the space into a landscape of pursuit. As Ugo Rondinone suggests: “it is a matter of not being able to distinguish between that, which we remember and that, which we long for”. Desire (for the exotic) is configured through the imprint of past experience; and the object of desire is reduced and controlled within this romanticising tendency. In Consandine’s work, however, the relationship between memory and longing is re-directed, even unleashed. Casting is a semi-mechanical sculptural process that elucidates exactly a memory of a form: it is an absolute absence, a perfect lack.'

In the words of the artist, spoken in 2024 to an expanded virtual auditorium of students at the Victorian College of the Arts, the intent and methodology have remarkable consistency with those of the early 2000s.

‘I think that I want to start talking from a position of sculpture. And I’m thinking about flesh. And I’m thinking about the embodiment of the I, and the eye. Thinking about the surface, which my eye desires, which my eye touches. These are ideas that I think are foundational to my practice, and the way that my practice opens out from sculpture to the body, to constructed environments, architecture, and moving image.’

Gertrude extends its deepest thanks and gratitude to the Consandine family, who organised a donation to Gertrude on behalf of Cate, contributed to by her own wider family, friends and community in mourning, in support of contemporary art and contemporary artistic careers.

For those who may need support at this or any future time, Support Act offers the free and confidential Wellbeing Helpline (1800 959 500) offering crisis relief for creative workers.