Catherine Redmond

Linocut #10, proof on newsprint, 2020

The studio is hot with ideas. I am painting and printing, photographing and drawing. This is a perfect time of complete isolation and generation. Away from everything I have time during my sabbatical to not only focus but have the thread of my ideas uninterrupted.

From the Archive, Found Poem #14, 2014

I’m sorting through things in order to make more space. My little house has no closets nor bookshelves, so I am in what feels like a perpetual state of reorganizing and sorting.  This is from a series of 20 Found Poems I completed the last winter I was in New York.  My cobbled together film camera, a Hassie, took some marvelous shots and I just used the contact prints.

Zach, Zip and Ruthie, 2020, Archival Digital Print

My geese are not even a year old but full of personality and distinctive traits. Like all living beings, DNA is far more powerful than we can reckon with or understand. For anyone who has spit into the tube or agreed to a mouth swab, the marvel we discover is how firmly our ancestry has stamped us.  I wonder at all those philanders of the past and how innocently they spread their seed never thinking that the chickens would come home to roost.

The Pond, 2020, Archival Digital Print

I’m always relieved when the media’s looking back at the last year is finished and the year actually begins.  2019 was so productive, so full of new things and new experiences, that I’m looking forward to it continuing.  Just adjusting my point of view changes things.  I rarely think to walk to the other side of my pond.  Usually I think about it in the summer when it is a lush tangle of plants and thick undergrowth.  So I don’t bother.  But, yesterday I took advantage of the frozen growth and the felled dried plants and decided to walk around the pond to look across at my homestead.  Just seeing it from a few yards away at a new angle was so pleasant.  How beautifully sited it is!

The pond is no longer frozen for this interlude before the deep cold returns.  The Solstice has been crossed and now the days will start to get longer. Of course I dream for spring.

Begonia Edge, 2019, Archival Digital Print

An accidental find, the edge between the Begonia leaf and the window shutter makes me shiver. I’m in my first week of my sabbatical and relishing the months of uninterrupted studio time ahead of me.  Being able to sleep late is such pleasure.  Having my mind de-cluttered of everything but my work and my life on the homestead.  Almost too good to be real.  I imagined painting the house pale pink yesterday with cream shutters and trim.  My fancies are tickling me now even in close to the darkest day of the year.

The Cornfield, 2019, Archival Digital Print

It was a long slog through last week.

Deep snow, unable to get out of the driveway to get to the train

I missed school on Monday,

I was supposed to chair a panel for Senior Survey, and

My reliable plowman didn’t get my messages

On it went, one thing after another.

But what there was

Was my favorite cornfield

Its orderly geometry penciled in the snow.

Three Girls Ready for Dreaming, 2019, Archival Digital Print

Night comes early now and the hens go to roost sooner now as the days are shortening and the cold is here.  I added a fresh bale of straw to the coop floor the other day for extra warmth. The girls started singing to themselves.

The light is so tender in November, the values very close.  I’m thinking of Morandi’s strange landscapes, overcast light, and the shades of grey-blue, dun, dull ochre and greyed green.

Rainy Afternoon, 2019, Archival Digital Print

A dark and dismal day, the rain was continual.

It gave me cause to sit by the fireplace and

listen

and listen;

Even the ashes have another life

in the hens’ dustbath bin.