Catherine Truman
Photography by Grant Hancock
Biography 2023
Catherine Truman is an established artist working across the disciplines of art and science. She is a co-founder and current partner of Gray Street Workshop.
Truman’s practice is renowned for its diversity and depth and incorporates, objects, contemporary jewellery, digital imagery, film and installation works with a research focus on the parallels between artistic process and scientific method.
Between 2009 and 2013 she was artist in residence in the Autonomic Neurotransmission Laboratory, the Anatomy and Histology departments and the Microscopy Suite at Flinders University, Adelaide.
In 2011 she was awarded an ANAT Synapse Residency to carry out a research project based at Flinders University focused on the role of touch and gesture in the communication of functional human anatomy to students of medical science in collaboration with Professor Ian Gibbins.
During 2013/14 Truman and Gibbins led The Microscope Project that culminated in a major exhibition at Flinders University Art Museum City Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia.
In 2015 Truman undertook a residency in the microscopy suite at Flinders University and the resulting works entitled In Preparation for Seeing, toured nationally and internationally with Gray Street Workshop’s thirtieth anniversary exhibition- Theatre of Detail during 2015/2016.
Truman was awarded an Arts South Australia Fellowship in 2016 and her work was 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. Truman was selected as the 2017 Jamfactory Icon and a solo exhibition, highlighting her art/science practice titled no surface holds toured nationally 2018-2020.
During 2019 Truman was artist in residence at both the State Herbarium and Botanic Gardens of South Australia and the Flinders Centre for Ophthalmology, Eye and Vision Research, School of Medicine, Flinders University undertaking The Visible Light Project: experiments in light and perception. Working alongside botanists, horticulturalists and an ophthalmologic photographer Truman researched the parallels between the ways in which the human eye and plants process light. A major solo exhibition titled Shared Reckonings was presented in the Museum of Economic Botany and the Dead House in the Botanic Gardens of South Australia as a part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival and explored a creative response to these paired cross-disciplinary residencies.
Epithelium, a film made for this exhibition was selected to screen as part of Machines Like Us, Episode 2 of SPECTRAvision, Multiplicity hosted by the Australian Network of Art and Technology (ANAT) in Melbourne in 2022.
During 2022 she is artist in residence at Carrick Hill, a unique House Museum surrounded by extensive formal gardens and endangered native bushland in the foothills of Adelaide undertaking a yearlong project entitled The Arrangements: assembling nature which delves into plant/human relationships, particularly the choices we make in assembling the natural world. This project culminated in an exhibition at Carrick Hill in March 2023, and was selected as an official Adelaide Festival event.
In 2022/23 Truman was also selected to participate in A Parnership for Uncertain Times, a year-long project
developed by Dr Deirdre Feeney in collaboration with the University of South Australia, ANAT, and Arts South Australia.
Truman has exhibited widely nationally and internationally and is represented in most major national and several international collections including the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; Pinakothek Moderne Munich; Coda-museum, Netherlands; Museum of Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Museum of Auckland; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Queensland Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Powerhouse Museum Sydney; and the Art Gallery of South Australia and Artbank.
Artist Statement 2023
I am an established artist and my practice traverses a wide variety of mediums including contemporary jewellery, object-making, film, photography, installation and performance text.
Over the past twenty-five years I have undertaken a series of interdisciplinary projects that have purposefully explored the parallels between the ways that the human body is represented through the disciplines of art and medical science. I have investigated how corporeal knowledge is gathered, challenged and advanced.
I have forged some important alliances over many years collaborating with neuroscientists, anatomists, microscopists, medical researchers, ophthalmic photographers, plant scientists and horticulturalists. All of these relationships remain central to my practice and the daily machinations of our work, our endeavours and our shared curiosity form the foundation of my full-time arts practice.
Since 2007 I have cultivated important relationships with the bio-medical researchers, scientists and educators within the specialised scientific environment of the School of Medicine at Flinders University and worked with students and staff in the practical anatomy classrooms, histology and neuroscience laboratories, the microscopy suite. The continuity of this exchange is special and rare and has been invaluable to the evolution of my practise.
As an artist I have learnt that making things with my hands leaves me with much less of a sense of dislocation from the world I live in and this, I feel is an interesting premise from which to examine the world of science.
Currently my research is focused on the precarious relationship between humans and the natural world. Recent years marked by raging bushfires, floods, dramatic shifts in our weather patterns and the consequential loss of habitat and biodiversity fuel every aspect of my practise now.
