Catherine Truman is an established artist whose practice is renowned for its diversity, incorporating installation, objects, contemporary jewellery, digital imagery and film with a focus upon the parallels between artistic process and scientific method. She is co- founder and current partner of Gray Street Workshop, Adelaide South Australia.

Catherine has undertaken many residencies within science environments, including neuroscience, biomedicine, histology, microscopy, and ophthalmology, and botany interested in the nexus between artistic and scientific approaches to research and inquiry. Her methods are founded on open conversations with scientists, thereby creating a discursive space in which both her own activities and those of scientists are equivalent creative acts.

Catherine has exhibited widely nationally and internationally including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Beijing, SOFA New York, New York and The Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.

Catherine Truman’s work is represented in most main Australian state, national collections and several major international collections.

Tell us about your experience with ANAT SPECTRA.
Well, firstly I want to pay tribute to ANAT. Over many years ANAT has been a critical conduit for connection to a community that represents a nexus of makers and thinkers across art, science and technology and ANAT SPECTRA gives us all the chance to physically inhabit that complex space together in real time.  

In 2022 I was invited to include Epithelium, a single channel video, in Machines Like Us, Episode 2 at ANAT SPECTRA Vision, Multipliclty, Melbourne. It was a chance to share something solid of the evolution of my career that has been shaped by working alongside scientists and researchers and technicians within a diverse range of scientific fields. Epithelium was made in collaboration with a senior Ophthalmic photographer, Angela Chappell during a residency in the Ophthalmic Imaging Unit at Flinders Centre for Vision. Using a Spectralis scanner, used for retinal angiograms, we captured the moments of an intricate focal shift; crossing over from the external to the internal surfaces of my eye; a delicate and intimate distance to travel between art and science, flesh and machine. The experience of sharing this video with other participants at ANAT SPECTRA 2022 Multiplicity, was the best kind of uncomfortable; a rich and immersive exchange.

What or who inspires you in the realm of interdisciplinary practice, and why?
One of the primary on-going interdisciplinary relationships has been with Ian Gibbins; emeritus professor of anatomy and neuroscientist at the School of Medicine, Flinders University and now a world-renowned poet and videographer. Together we’ve undertaken a series of interdisciplinary projects that have explored how corporeal knowledge is gathered, challenged and advanced through the disciplines of art and medical science. 

This collaboration has been a catalyst for working with others. I have cultivated important relationships with bio-medical researchers, scientists, educators, students and staff in the practical anatomy classrooms, histology and neuroscience laboratories, the microscopy suite and the ophthalmic unit within the School of Medicine at Flinders University and further afield working with plant scientists and horticulturalists.  The continuity of these exchanges has been special and rare and invaluable to the evolution of my practise.

I feel it’s imperative to examine the tenets of our disciplines, challenge them, take risks and open to the language of other methodologies. Then there’s a real possibility of creating something new together. 

Over recent years I have focused on how scientific knowledge informs our daily lives and how we engage with the natural world, especially when we have been increasingly distanced from it.  Climate change, loss of biodiversity and the fragility of the natural world are grave and weighty issues. It is a challenge to be hopeful, however as an artist I feel that by using the intimate language of hand-making to convey ideas and propositions about global uncertainties I am more able to encourage personal and immediate dialogue and reinforce the capacity of art to disrupt assumptions and expectations; to reflect on causes and shifting attitudes towards environmental consciousness. I believe it is this ‘presence of the personal’ in the culture of science and art that creates the possibility of novel insights and ways to communicate complex ideas.

Name a cultural work (film, book, music etc) that inspired or challenged your creative perspective, and tell us why.
I’ve always felt that artists are like litmus paper. If you want to understand the heartbeat of a culture look at the art. 

Wandering with Intent, Position Doubtful and Craft for a Dry Lake, three books written by Kim Mahood, have inspired some deeper thinking about what constitutes where the physical body ends and landscape (country) begins. These are collections of non-fiction essays written in the first person by an artist raised straddling two worlds; post-colonial farmland and first nations’ country. Mahood’s poetic search for a personal connection, resonant with the land, natural and managed has challenged my perspective on the linear notions of time and the evolution of knowledge.

What’s next? Tell us about your next project, collaboration or thinking.
I have just completed a major project and am attempting to sit still. But It’s a rare and a difficult place to sit without tension. Already, I am being compelled to look outside; there is a devastating toxic algal bloom at my door, right here along the coast of South Australia. There is a call to action and many kinds of new gatherings; of communities and scientists, and people who rely on the sea for a living. And together we are all dumbfounded by the severity of this ‘natural/unnatural’ disaster. We are scrambling for understanding, for solutions. It’s a critical time to see what we can come up with together across disciplines and cultures, across generations. This is where I am right now; on a precipice.

Currently my research is focused on the precarious relationship between humans and the natural world. Recent years have been marked by raging bushfires, floods, and now toxic algal blooms. These dramatic shifts in our weather patterns and the consequential loss of habitat and biodiversity fuel every aspect of my practise now. Caring deeply for the earth, for the continuance of life, for how we negotiate and balance survival and sufficiency of all life on the planet underpins the culture of science and underlies everything I strive to do as an artist. 

A particular project of recent years continues to resonate and influence my current approach to practice. In 2023 I participated in A Partnership for Uncertain Times, an exciting project generated by Dr Dierdre Feeney, University of South Australia and ANAT. 

I collaborated with Ian Gibbins and together we generated a video and sound work called The Taken Path. We walked and filmed the same path in the Adelaide foothills once a month for a year. This simple poetic endeavor led to some profound insights about the very nature of human vision and how we observe and alter the environments we share. The opportunity to slow down and fully immerse enabled a deeper quality of collaboration and we became the ‘onlookers’ comfortable with ‘uncertainty’. We applied minimal intervention and intention, and in doing so discovered an ever-expanding breadth of subject-matter. The experience continues to shift my methodologies and approach to practice. An evolution of the work was presented for the 2025 Adelaide Festival and a further iteration will be presented at ANAT SPECTRA: Reciprocity in October 2025.