Fathom (solo touring exhibition to three museum venues in Scotland)

This research investigates the possibilities, and paradoxes, of how combining the re-presentation of specific state of the art scientific and technological data and methodological approaches with material and philosophical artistic practice, such as drawing and sculpture, can potentially bring new perceptual understandings, and balances between the aesthetic, empirical, predictive, insightful and poetic. Cattrell’s methodology for this research made connections between artistic proposition, the technological measuring and empirical understanding of the sea, landscape, and inside the human body in their vicissitudinous states. This included hands on research observing neuro surgery with Prof. Morten L. Kringelbach at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. She also had dialogues with staff at renewable energy centres in Orkney, which gave her experiential input which contributed to the formation of a new body of artworks. Cattrell undertook a residency in 2010 hosted by the Pier Art Centre, in Stromness, Orkney, funded by the RSA and Creative Scotland. She worked closely with Dr Mike Bell at ICIT, the International Centre for Island Technology at Heriot Watt University. ICIT uses new technologies, and data information, to digitally map the unseen hydrodynamics of the ever changing wave, and tidal energy, around the Orkney islands for the purpose of renewable energy development. It is the policy of the Scottish Government to generate all of Scotland's gross annual electricity consumption by 2020, using renewable energy technologies. During the residency she researched in libraries, and museums, to gather historical information about the mapping, and cultural understanding of the sea and land. She particularily liked the Murdo Mackenzie Admiralty Maps in Kirkwall Library, and texts by writer George Mackay Brown. Cattrell studied the anatomical specimens at Gordon Museum in Guy’s Hospital, London, and observed dissections at UCL. As a direct consequence of the Orkney residency, the artworks produced, and additional existing sculptures following the same line of research enquiry, were exhibited in a solo show called ‘Fathom’, at the Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, in 2010. Later in 2012 ‘Fathom’ toured to Timespan, in Sutherland, and then Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. Additionally ‘Cape Farewell’ invited Cattrell to participate and contribute in 2011, to the ‘Scotland’s Islands Expedition’, and exhibit new artworks commissioned for ‘Carbon12’ at the EDF Foundation, Paris, in 2012.