HEART TAKES FLIGHT: Catherine Long at the Lucent Lobby: In collaboration with Wilder Gallery

Presented in collaboration with Wilder Gallery.

Rhythm is the starting point for each of Catherine Long’s paintings. With a background in contemporary cross-disciplinary dance and improvisation, Long’s work is rooted in a painting process that evokes the somatic feeling of dancing. Her trio of paintings for Heart Takes Flight are large-scale explorations of movement, colour, and form that offer an immersive sensory experience for the viewer. 

Long’s current way of working emerged from a period of time bookended by operations on both hips and diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer in her 30s. Unable to dance to the same level and seeking to move away from performance, she looked to large-scale abstract painting as a means of exploring the relationship between paint and the moving body, looking to imbue the energy of dance into the surface of the canvas. Painting, which Long sees as a personal performance, activates a somatic space for the artist in which to consider improvisation, choreography, and in-the-moment reactions. 

Long begins by choosing an initial colour with which to start, before selecting a piece of music, establishing a rhythm and mode of movement in which to work. She approaches the blank canvas with dynamic, rapid gestures to lay a compositional groundwork. Allowing each layer to dry, she repeatedly returns to the canvas, building up the image as an accretion that acts as an archive of her movements over a period of time. Although she begins by painting and moving quickly, as each work comes together, Long’s process slows down until eventually she makes the final touches that allow the composition to mesh together. 

This durational approach signifies Long’s interest in traces and remnants. As she works, previously placed marks are covered, but never completely erased; resonances and traces feed through each layer. This notion is in part drawn from the artist’s lived experience of the post-surgical mark on the body, and the associated idea that a mark, once made, can never be undone. 

The works in this exhibition come out of a period of time Long spent on residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall. Heart Takes Flight, from which the show takes its title, was made during this residency, inspired obliquely by the holistic experience of being immersed in the local landscape and named after a song that was key to its creation. 

Working with a bold palette that evokes a natural environment, the psychological pull and impact of colour play a key role in Long’s desire to create works that continually open themselves up to their audience, offering something new on each viewing. Drawing on the world of dance, the artist seeks to invoke a feeling of kinaesthetic empathy, where the neural networks associated with movement are activated in the viewer while watching dance, even if they are sitting still themselves. Long is interested in the potential of painting to achieve a similarly embodied experience for the viewer, proposing that the bodily movement captured in the surface of painting is a fundamental part of its power. 

Words by Anna Souter