Here, a totem-building bending under its weight springs from the body of a dinosaur bleeding rainbows; there, an inverted candelabra crowned with a pink sun-face takes off towards lunar constellations; everywhere, little childlike figures searching for bliss watch extraordinary creatures form and collapse.
Catherine Bond's monsters are improbable aggregates of toys, objets d'art, decorations, antiques and fragments of her son's and her partner's childhood drawings. The smooth, satiny rendering of wood pencil on black mylar backgrounds lends an immaterial, theatrical quality to her puppet scenographies.
Any attempt to describe Catherine's drawings inevitably turns into a poetics of the dreamlike, that is to say, into a narrative that seeks to make sense of fragments. As in a dream, the artist borrows the visual language of childhood to thwart the guardians of the ego and open up access to the occult realities of the unconscious.
Common sense has it that monsters are the product of our fears, but as dwellers of our psyche's depths, they are also heralds of our potential and freedom. The open, candid expression of the little spectators corresponds to a hypothetical degree zero of subjectivity, the ideal state of receptivity for understanding what our monsters have to say.
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