Cath Ferguson

Tammy
2021
Acrylic and pencil on Gesso
148cm x 170cm


How long have you had a studio at APT?
Since the beginning (when I initially shared the studio with Kevin)

Which female artists inspired you growing up?
That's a good question which draws attention to the fact that when I was growing up the canon was almost exclusively male and I can't remember being introduced to any female artists (thank goodness things have changed). At art school I became interested in abstract painting, also dominated by male artists but in the years that have followed my attention has been drawn to the example of Surrealist Claude Cahun as well as the work of Eileen Agar and the photomontage of Hannah Hoch, because they are imaginative in ways that sidestep dominant conventional ways of artmaking.

What is the most important piece of advice you have been given?
Not exactly a piece of advice, but for a short while after leaving art school I worked in a small milieu whose informal ethos was the idea that to be generous to the artmaking process was above all else

Why did you choose this piece of work today?
I make my paintings very instinctively, even though research is fundamental to my practice. Recently, I have become aware of a sort of 'heroic' end to finishing a painting in my practice and which I have become conscious of as owing a lot to the history of the Modernist, male struggle implicit within American post-War painting. I have begun to think about other ways of making paintings that are more matter of fact and documentary and which open up different relations to painting, for me.