Catherine Clayton-Smith

A strange beauty and a sense of something not quite definably familiar pervades the painting of Catherine Clayton-Smith.

Clayton-Smith is interested in the way we visualise, remember and record the world and our feelings. She collects remnants of all the diverse ways we see: online imagery, torn pages from magazines, physical photograhs, snapshots – digital and physical artifacts collected and stored alongside the her own internally imprinted visual memories. Collecting is a means of processsing and ordering.

These fragmentary resources are recycled and recreated into something new and fresh - multi-layered mixes of memory, observation and re-creation of the seen and found. Her imagined landscapes, or mindscapes, are, a synthesis of constructed visual memories. surface; stillness and motion collide.

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, intense colour jumps and surface components cohere to poetically open out a psychological space, where response is felt and nothing is absolute.

Originally from Christchurch, Clayton-Smith has lived in Sydney since completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in 2014. While a student, she won several awards including the National Art School's Parkers Sydney Fine Art Painting Award, the Studio W Exhibition Prize, the Blank Canvas Award for Painting and the John Olsen Prize for Figure Drawing. Since graduating she has had six solo exhibitions in Sydney and numerous group exhibitions. In 2018, she was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She has work in public and private collections.