Cathy Carter: Wai Wai Wai

Cathy Carter is a photographic and installation artist, based in Auckland. Her work explores bodies of water as physical, cultural, and unique environmental landscapes. Carter’s practice investigates our often complex, psychological relationship to water across different perspectives and geographical locations, utilising digital collaging to create new ways of experiencing these spaces.

Carter’s fascination with water often extends into ecological and ethical issues, conceptually drawing our attention to environmental concerns facing our oceans and waterways.

Wai Wai Wai is inspired by concerns about climate change and our evolving relationship with bodies of water as we enter the Anthropocene. The work explores bodies of water as physical, cultural, and unique environmental ‘landscapes’ and investigates our complex psychological relationship to water through different perspectives and geographical locations.

In exploring the concept of Fissures (Auckland Photography Festival’s 2019 theme), Carter also draws on Barnett Newman’s post-WWII zip paintings. William M Boot wrote that Barnett Newman believed that “old standards of beauty were irrelevant: the sublime was all that was appropriate, an experience of enormity which might lift modern humanity out of its torpor.”

Carter is a graduate of AUT University with a Master of Art and Design (Hons) 2013 and has been a regular finalist in the Wallace Art Awards (2018, 2017, 2016, 2014), the international HeadOn Portrait Prize (2018, 2016 and 2015) and the Walker and Hall Waiheke Art Prize (2018, 2017, 2016). Carter’s work has regularly been exhibited in across New Zealand and Overseas and is held in a number of distinguished public, private and corporate collections including The Wallace Arts Trust and the Parliamentary Art Collection, in New Zealand.