ABOUT
Catherine Mary Camargo
“My ear was firmly planted on the wooden floor, listening to whispers of souls from lifetimes before and after me.
I can hear laughter and cries, I can hear pleading and sounds of making love, I cannot tell you who they are from.
sometimes I wonder if they are only from different versions of myself. I can feel myself in millions of beings in that moment, I can hear the loud crying strums of instruments made from stones and bison echo.”
This selected portion from my poem "Travelers in Spirit, Travelers on Land" has been just a little of the soul and first utterance of what I am inspired and driven by, the entanglements of our own essence and those who existed before us.
Through initially being saddened yet interested by my Haitian grandmothers worsening dementia and now grieving the loss of my best friend and father to cancer, I have become determined to broaden my investigation of memory and loss, both personal and cultural.I would observe the way my grandmother would confuse a memory from her early adulthood to something that happened just moments ago and that confident moment of confusion and collision was beautifully interesting to me, the power of intermediate mental states and conditions, as well as our own histories. My projects intersect the genres of visual anthropology, poetry, conceptual art, personal ritualism, and personal/ impersonal internal therapeutic work.
I find myself currently questioning what happens to our memories when we die, and how people can respectfully collect them and display them once we are gone, retroceding from my ancestors and studies of past life experiences to my own Father.
While rooted in painting, my multidisciplinary works of monochromatic drawings on canvas scrolls and works of poetry are attestations. These representations having to do with multiple conditions: post-colonial traditions, historical research of religious passion and cultural achievement, the notion of loss whether land or memory, love, relationships, and angels such as my very own father with knowledge we do not possess during our time here on earth.
Bio
Catherine Mary Camargo (b. Miami, Fl, 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist based in between Miami, Fl and Baltimore, MD. Her practice is based in painting, drawings, photography, and poetry guided mostly by personal intuitive forces and research on personal and cultural memory. She fantasizes about her work becoming physical or written reflections and attestations of the beautiful complex notions between life and death and the intermediate mental states in between the both..