'Katthy' was a spelling mistake at birth. I had a traumatic birth—forced out by a doctor who was in a hurry to go shopping and buy shoes. I often get stuck in thoughts or spaces which I feel like I can’t get out of.
—Katthy Cavaliere
Katthy Cavaliere (1972–2012) had a lifelong project of packing, storing and transporting the wreckage of her personal possessions and transforming it into art. Exorcising the past as a waking dream, but never able to let go of anything, Katthy made her private life public via an art practice that focused on the stuff of everyday life, such as chairs, clothes, toys, bags and boxes.
Featuring photographs, video and installations, Katthy Cavaliere: Loved traces thirteen years of key works by an artist who, having trained as a photographer, found form across many disciplines. Just as she embraced the typo in her birth name, Katthy considered the mistakes, accidents and emptiness of existence, ‘reality’s black tunnel of nothingness’, as imaginary spaces capable of producing art. This retrospective provides an insight into a life lived in objects, where readymade things acquire an aura of love and trauma and comprise a portrait of the artist.
Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Katthy Cavaliere: Loved travelled to Carriageworks, Sydney, in 2016.
Header image: brown paper, 2001, Katthy Cavaliere