Catherine Truman
Photography by Grant Hancock
Biography 2025
Catherine Truman is an established artist whose practice is renowned for its diversity, incorporating installation, objects, contemporary jewellery, digital imagery and film with a focus upon the parallels between artistic process and scientific method. She is co-founder and current partner of Gray Street Workshop, Adelaide South Australia.
Truman has undertaken many residencies within science environments, including neuroscience, biomedicine, histology, microscopy, and ophthalmology, and botany interested in the nexus between artistic and scientific approaches to research and inquiry. Her methods are founded on open conversations with scientists, thereby creating a discursive space in which both her own activities and those of scientists are equivalent creative acts.
Between 2009 and 2013 she was artist in residence in the Autonomic Neurotransmission Laboratory, the Anatomy and Histology department and the Microscopy Suite at Flinders University, Adelaide.
Awarded an Arts South Australia Fellowship in 2016, Catherine’s work featured in a significant survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She was the subject of the 2016 South Australian Living Artist (SALA) monograph, Catherine Truman: touching distance, written by Melinda Rackham, published by Wakefield Press and selected as the 2017 Jamfactory Icon. A solo exhibition, highlighting her art/science practice titled no surface holds toured nationally 2018-2020.
During 2019 Catherine was artist in residence at the State Herbarium and Botanic Gardens of South Australia and Flinders Centre for Ophthalmology, Eye and Vision Research, School of Medicine, Flinders University undertaking The Visible Light Project: experiments in light and perception.
Her solo exhibition Shared Reckonings was presented in the Museum of Economic Botany and the Dead House in the Botanic Gardens of South Australia as part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival. Epithelium, a film made for this exhibition featured at ANAT SPECTRAvision, Multiplicity, Melbourne.
During 2022/23 Catherine was artist in residence at Carrick Hill, culminating in an exhibition titled The Arrangements: assembling nature which explored plant/human relationships at Carrick Hill and was selected as an official event of 2023 Adelaide Festival.
In 2023 Truman was also selected to participate in “A Partnership for Uncertain Times”, co-developed by Dr Deirdre Feeney, University of South Australia and the Australian Network for Art and Technology and initiated The Taken Path: a durational project in collaboration with Ian Gibbins.
The Taken Path was developed and presented as a significant video installation during the 2025 Adelaide Festival at the Wall Gallery, Carrick Hill.
In 2025 Truman will present a major body of new work as part of Beautiful Tensions: Gray Street Workshop Celebrates Forty Yearsa national touring exhibition presented in partnership with the JamFactory, Adelaide.
Catherine has exhibited widely nationally and internationally including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing, SOFA New York, New York and The Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.
Catherine Truman’s work is represented in most main Australian state, national collections and several major international collections.
http://catherinetruman.com.au
Artist Statement 2025
Human impact on the environment and the relationship between the domestic and scientific interpretation of the natural world, from both historic and contemporary perspectives has been my focus of the past few years.
Climate change, loss of biodiversity and the fragility of the natural world are grave and weighty issues. By using the intimate language of hand-making to convey ideas and propositions about global uncertainties I hoped to encourage personal and immediate dialogue on this topic and reinforce the capacity of art to disrupt assumptions and expectations; to reflect on causes and shifting attitudes towards environmental consciousness.
It is a challenge to be hopeful. Caring deeply for the earth, for the continuance of life, for how we negotiate and balance survival and sufficiency with all life on the planet, underlies everything I strive to do as an artist.
