Catherine Widgery
"Catherine Widgery" by Donald Brackett, Winter 2007, pp. 109-10
More and more, artists are realizing that the visual domain has always been as much about the element of time as about physical space, and many are responding accordingly, letting the temporal experience become the focus of their material investigations. J. G. Ballard once said that without a sense of time, consciousness would be difficult to imagine. How about impossible?
In the work of Catherine Widgery, a senior sculptor working here with the architect and designer Sanjeev Shankar, we have perhaps the ideal superimposition of sculptural and temporal media. Grouped under the collective rubric “Shadows and Windy Places,” the three sculptural situations shown at Gallery Stratford were an attempt to make palpable something nearly imperceptible in our lives, to capture and reify the fourth dimension.
Wind Prayers consists of what look like hand painted chiffon kites captured in mid-swirl, moving across the gallery ceiling (sky). Closer inspection reveals, however, that it is actually only one kite, represented in a sequence of rise and fall, now frozen in time as it passes through an arc of action and entropy. The only thing missing was a fan to make the ensemble move.
The wind missing in Wind Prayers was abundantly present in the artist’s ten-minute video Shadow of Time, in which the surface of a pond in New Delhi, India, was filmed over a 24-hour period and condensed into an evocative watery canvas of multilayered moments and meanings. Again, time’s arc was the content, with the fluidity of water as its physical metaphor. The visual compression of the piece made time seem substantial enough to taste.
Liquid Light was an ambitious but understated evocation of another sort of perpetual motion, contained in a tableau designed to provoke the calm contemplation of impermanence through the use of an Indian copper kalash. This vessel, from which single drops of water fall slowly into a suspended glass bowl, is used in Hindu temples to symbolize fertility and the active patterns of procreation. Here, it was illuminated by a hanging lamp that cast a large circular shadow on the floor, with each drop creating a dynamic ripple in its own dark, reflected silence. The content of this piece was all but immaterial—the physical objects were mere vehicles for the apprehension of invisible forces that flow, to paraphrase the popular song, within us and without us.
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