Catherine in her studio at Stove Works. Photo: Wolf Francis @wolfrancis
Catherine Rush is a performer and poet at heart. She hails from Atlanta and considers herself a non-career artist. Her art can be considered multidisciplinary as it involves many themes explored through many mediums. Catherine often explores the world through performance art often incorporating video, costume and poetry into her communicative creations. She has written art reviews and interviews for publications such as Burnaway, Arts ATL, Jump Philly and many others. If you were to meet her you would likely see that she has a unique position as someone who is free to explore the strange, fun, slow, and enticing moments in life all in her own time and also use her skills to create platforms for other artists. It was a pleasure as always to sit down and talk with such a thoughtful artist.
Saria: How would you describe your artistic style?
Catherine: I do poetry and performance art and I tend to do it in an intuitive way. It also
responds to the audience. It's interactive and aims to open people up for thinking about things in a different way. So I guess the way that the sequences of images or words are organized, it's disorienting but it's reorienting too. When you're changing and things are changing. It's disorienting, it's uncomfortable. But I think there's a future logic to my work.
Saria: What attracted you to performance art?
Catherine: I started reading poems and I found that I would get really nervous reading poetry. I wanted ways to help people engage with it and be more open to listening to poetry. Poetry, by itself, can be really boring; of course I love watching people read their poems, especially for the first time, especially in a shared space, where you feel the electricity between people and the tension and excitement and nervousness, I love that. I started finding connections with my actual body beyond just kind of clowning or bringing in task based movements and things. When I started working on performances with my friend, Aida Curtis, she brought me in to help with a tribute she did to the film Wicker Man where she choreographed these song and dance numbers in a way that was very accessible for even someone like me, who didn't have a dance background. It was so painful and uncomfortable but I ended up helping her with a few more group performance pieces. Then she and I started making pieces together as The Clutching Dream. That was more performance art than poetry although she's also a poet. Now we've come full circle and are making a poem together.
Dehiscence, 2020. Installed in Hot Doughnuts Now at Stove Works.
Saria: Where do your ideas come from?
Catherine: Ideas come from all their places. While you're walking, hearing people talk about seeing something funny or out of place, being hit by memories and how they sort of dovetail or don't connect with what's happening right now. I think a lot of my poetry comes from looking at uncomfortable things, be it finding ways to express or understand trauma, personal trauma, collected trauma, or just witnessing being close to someone having trauma. I think that is where a lot of my earlier poetry was coming from. And now, there is a sort of folding into grief and being in a country where there's not like, any scaffolding for grief collectively. That's been something my work has focused on for a long time. But I do it, I guess, in a really playful way to try and get people into a comfortable place where they can open up. My ideas come from everything, from life, I’m a big believer in things like ordinary poetry and ordinary art.
Saria: What is the difference between doing performance art and just being some weird girl at a party?
Catherine: Right, like that sort of ties into questions of identity and intention. If you are aware as a person at the party, and in your head, you're doing performance art, then you're doing performance art. I've known people who have had really sort of rampant unchecked mental health issues that also believed that they were just doing weird performances and nobody understood. Who's to say they're wrong, they're not wrong, both things are true. For me when I do a performance, it's a different space than when I'm just walking on the street and dancing by myself. I have some characters that sometimes appear, but a lot of the time, even if these characters appear, it's sort of a mishmash, weaving, I guess, between different identities and personalities.
Dehiscence, 2020, performance.
Saria: How do you feel when you participate in a performance? What's it like to subject yourself to a certain role for an extended period of time?
Catherine: Usually it's very calming. I kind of got into a different state. I feel like it's almost meditative. Obviously, there are times when something goes wrong, or there's something else outside of it in my life that's keeping me from wanting to access that space. But once I am committed, the performance has started. I am in a really restful space, even if I'm doing something more endurance-oriented. It's something that is less comfortable. It feels like I'm sort of sinking into a more meditative space. I also love the idea that how someone is viewing something changes it, and so I feel like people viewing my performances, or hearing my poetry, changes it. When you have an audience, it undoes illusions of control, but you also are acting on them; you're on the level where there's nothing being taken. I think you get a lot out of just seeing something surprising and different and absurd and funny and sweet.
Saria: How does your personal identity Inform your work?
Catherine: I think that for a long time, I didn't realize it till I was in therapy, but I was very afraid of being thought of as crazy. I think that's something that I looked at a lot in my writing and sort of something I wrestled with a lot in my early writing was what is it to be crazy, especially like the crazy woman, right? I've found a lot of meaning in my work personally, which has come back directly to my sense of self. I feel like performance and poetry are both ways to sort of find your center again and to affirm your own reality. In James Baldwin's Uses of The Blues, he talks about these three different musical impulses and all of them are sort of ways to deal with suffering and how so much art-making, in general, is our way of dealing with suffering. Sort of what he strips down to is that one of the more, isolated ways of meaning-making is self-affirmation as a route to joy. So by transmuting your experience into something lyrical, it gives you self-authority. You can apply that to any art form, or you can apply that to other things that we don't traditionally identify as art. What makes it really powerful in the realm of language is that you are actively changing language. Another Baldwin quote says that “Every writer is born into a language that you have to help change,” and I think when you bring in the physical element, I think it's even more alchemical.
Dehiscence, detail.
Saria: What do you hope to accomplish in your art?
Catherine: On one level, it's always about survival. It's always about yourself. I think that sort of ripples out to other people. Because writing even though you do it in isolation, usually, almost exclusively, it's deeply social. You are communicating, even if you're writing the most coded, secretive, redacted kind of thing. You're still communicating. Performance also is deeply social, even when I'm not interacting with people, and even when I'm completely ignoring everybody around me. In that sense, it's also about fluency, harmony, and connection. All of those things are healing. And for me, especially to someone who's not a career artist, it's all bound together. Like there's definitely like a lifeblood of community and survival running through all of it; even the things I do in isolation. The more people come together especially through art expression, the more we find that we're talking about and wanting similar things. Writing in terms of transformation is just changing the language. Changing the story, changing the myth, changing the metaphor.
Saria: What have you been reading/thinking about recently?
Catherine: Well, I couldn't sleep. So I read in one night the gifts of imperfection Brené Brown. She's amazing, she does research in shame and vulnerability and fear studies. It’s really good. I've been thinking about it and I'm really interested in PTSD. I think, coming from army families, I definitely have complex PTSD. I feel like almost everyone I know has some variety of PTSD. I feel like we are such a traumatized world. I think I'm really interested in how we can heal through community, even on an individual to individual basis.
Saria: What was the best part about your Stove Works residency experience?
Catherine: Definitely meeting the other residents, and in Covid times, learning to have a bunch of roommates again was a really special experience and to be brought together with so many dynamic inspiring personalities has been really nourishing and encouraging and I've learned so much from everyone I've met here, including you. Seeing people's practices and how people work has been super cool. I've lived with many artists always but never in this more professional setting.