cathy ward’s art is both rebellion and celebration

MEMORIALS GROWNFROM CLAY AND INKCathy Ward’s art is both rebellion and celebration

By DOUG HARVEY

Cathy Ward 10_Catharyne Ward BLANK ARTICLE 24/03/2015 16:45 Page 2

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leftSurgenesis, 200816 x 20 ins., 40.6 x 50.8 cm

aboveGloriend, 20089 x 12 ins., 22.9 x 30.5 cm

Images courtesy of the artistAll works shown are china clay and India ink on board

Impossibly intricate, nearly-abstract renderings ofhair incised into scratchboard; baroque cut-papercollages sourced from porno mags; an immersive

environment of carved and painted trees meticulouslyencrusted with Germanic kitsch; a decade-longexhaustive photodocumentation of food vans; luminousfin-de-siècle paintings for post-punk record covers; afaux-museological recreation of a neo-paganist secretsociety initiation chamber; a re-enactment of thedoomed trek of the Donner Party (minus the actualcannibalism) – unlike many artists classified as“outsider”, Catharyne Ward has passed through asuccession of distinct phases more appropriate to thecareer of a mainstream post-studio conceptualist like MikeKelley or Rosemarie Trockel.

Yet, despite attending the Royal College of Art in

London (albeit in ceramics) and hanging with EduardoPaolozzi, she has managed to avoid being shortlisted forthe Turner Prize or gracing the cover of Artforum. So far.Such conventional accolades would not be hard toimagine, given the ambition, timeliness, cross-disciplinary panache and sheer visual beauty of the work,but Ward’s forceful idiosyncracy, authentically subversivepolitical undertones and psychological candour – not tomention her labour-intensive craftsmanship – have kepther outsider credibility intact.

Perhaps the most well-loved works in Ward's diverseoeuvre are her scratchboard drawings of cascading,contorted masses of hair, which have been likened to thework of Madge Gill and Austin Osman Spare. Thesomewhat disreputable hobbyist medium – a subtractive,even sculptural drawing practice where a surface of blackIndia ink is scraped away to reveal an underlying layer ofwhite china clay – packs a graphic punch, while comingequipped with a whole set of symbolic connotations.

Its palette delivers a stark Victorian vibe and a senseof dreamlike inversion, as with a photographic negativeor radiograph, before the first line is even carved out.


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Once it has, there is a constant undeniable violence tothe process – so slight as to be pleasurable, but carryinga transgressive charge. She uses a surgical scalpel to sliceopen her images.

Ward’s “Herworld” and “Liberty Realm”scratchboard series (1997–2014) and related projects(ranging from hand-tinted prints and digital animations,to a scavenged bathtub painted with pigment made fromground-up, hoarded hair clippings from the 1970s)emerged initially from improvised line drawing, whichrapidly coalesced into intricate, illusionistic renderings ofornate, organic forms – most recognisably, hair. These arethe most intimate and personal of Ward’s works,conveying none of the spectacular didactic complexity ofthe “Donner Party” or “Transromantik” projects (bothcreated with her husband and frequent-collaborator EricWright), but verging instead on an obsessional, personalabstraction; the mapping of a Romantic inner world thatis constantly seething with stormy psychological energies.

One of the specific sources Ward identifies for thissymbolic turmoil is her childhood spent in St Joseph’sConvent Preparatory School, Ashford, Kent, under thequestionable care of the notorious Sisters of Mercy. TheIrish government’s Ryan report, as quoted by HenryMcDonald in The Guardian newspaper on May 20,2009, stated that the girls in the Sisters of Mercy’s charge“endured frequent assaults and humiliation designed tomake them feel worthless.” The nuns’ ego-pulverisingagenda proved fundamental to Ward’s graphomaniacalcoping strategies – as were their grooming habits.

“The Order was not allowed to have hair”, recallsWard, whose own mane, for the record, is long, dark,straight and parted down the middle. “It was cut veryshort – a few millimeters – at their investiture, and keptthat way. As a child I was shocked, appalled, fascinatedthat nuns sacrificed their hair in this way. Hair in the1960s was a symbol of liberation and this liberty wasbeing wilfully, symbolically removed. This stayed withme in a subconscious way.”

It stayed with her consciously, as well: when the hairdrawings started, they functioned for Ward as memorialsfor fallen comrades, particularly the unexpected passingof her former lover and countercultural mentor from thepost-convent teen years, a radical post-hippy agitatornamed John Green. That same year (1997) marked theonset of myalgic encephalomyelitis and a battery ofphysical and psychological symptoms that wentundiagnosed for the next decade. Ward was frequentlyleft debilitated, unable to muster the resources to tacklethe ambitious large-scale installations that had begun togarner attention. The scratchboard drawings were smallin scale and socially undemanding, and became theprimary portal to her creative inner realms.

Ward developed a highly complex privatepictographic language, beginning with isolateddepictions of ornate coiffure-fragments, but quicklymorphing into landscapes and unidentifiable organicforms. Where the initial drawings often invited afigurative reading, they eventually came to bearticulating cosmic psychic spaces animated by sublime

above: Tressure Rise, 2003, 12 x 18 ins., 30.5 x 45.7 cmprevious pages: Reactor, 20011–12, 18 x 24 ins., 45.7 x 61 cm


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Doug Harvey is an artist, writer and critic, experimental musician, independent curator,and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. His most recent solo show at JancarGallery had the self-explanatory title “Found Moldy Slides”, and he is currently teachinga course in “Outsider Theory” at CalArts.

tidal paroxysms and cataclysmic shudders, made up ofprecise trompe l’oeil vortices and webs.

Throughout these fully-evolved works,accumulations of scalpel-inscribed lines oscillate betweenforms that describe unseen forces – sound waves, orgonedischarges, magnetic fields, the wind – and thosereflecting human attempts to contain, control andchannel such forces. Sometimes these attempts aresinister and oppressive: severely plaited hairdos suitablefor a convent schoolgirl. Elsewhere they are benign,transpersonal, archetypal – mimicking the pagan corndollies that crop up elsewhere in Ward’s work andrepresent a periodic symbolic vessel for the vegetal spiritbetween harvest and planting.

Considered together, Ward’s hair drawings take onthe semblance of a journal – a diaristic transcription ofthe undulating seismic energies coursing through a longdark night of the soul. Perversely, this dedicatedexploration and recording of visionary form recalls notonly the decorative horror vacuii of Gill or AloiseCorbaz, but the deeply personal and idiosyncratic sign-systems pursued by the most quintessentiallymainstream artists of the modern era: the AbstractExpressionists.

Ward’s drawings deploy line in all-over compositionsthat are as playful, deep and dimensionally virtuosic asJackson Pollock’s seminal drip paintings. But it is one ofthe secret histories of the Abstract Expressionists –erased in the great Hans Hoffman/ Clement Greenbergmarch to flatness – that actually brings them to mind.

Before embarking on his drip odyssey, Pollock was oneof a number of artists (including Adolph Gottlieb, MarkTobey, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman) exploringthe use of invented pictographic languages – languageswhich were linear, symbolic, improvised, gestural,informed by both “primitive” indigenous art traditionsand the Surrealists’ early interest in outsider art, andconstantly teetering on the fulcrum between formalismand sign-making.

This was a turning inward in search of a universalvisual language entirely open to improvisation andchange. In contrast to the prevailing materialism, manyof these artists regarded their work as talismanic, infusedwith spiritual presence and – perhaps most significantlywith regard to Cathy Ward – descriptive of a visionarypsychic landscape.

Combining the visionary sweep of a William Blakeillustration with the meticulous authority of a banknoteengraving, Ward’s hair drawings hold a dark mirror up tothe culture of European male privilege in which theseworks were imbedded. Some qualities are reversed, someare indistinguishable from their counterparts, but theirsums are, strangely, mutually validating. When it comesto “outside” versus “inside”, the important issue is whichdirection you are facing.

above: Loves Labours Lost, 2003, 12 x 18 ins., 30.5 x 45.7 cm


cathy ward’s art is both rebellion and celebration

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