Catherine Jacobs
Catherine Jacobs is a London based freelance research psychologist, educator, artist and mother of a teenage daughter. Her art practice, which is mostly photographic, uses insights from her parallel career as a research psychologist and everyday materials and situations to make open-ended and ambiguous images that celebrate positive states of not knowing. The work highlighted here was made during the first UK Covid 19 Lockdown. “Without the usual school run or travelling home ‘in between’ spaces to process and move to the next part of the day the demands on me often felt layered up on top of each other in an often overwhelming and bewildering way as domestic duties ran alongside work and home-schooling tasks. One way of coping was to bring the playful processes of art making from the studio into cleaning and domestic chores from time-to-time.” Catherine is currently working on a photo book about parenthood and trust in an age of photographic sharing on social media.
Other series, shown below, are from her analogue, ‘Uncertainties’ series of landscape photographs made working up close with body and face creams and ‘In Proximities’ series of cityscapes made using office equipment.
She has been shown in institutions (including a solo show at MAC Birmingham, commercial galleries (including Flowers Gallery, Sarah Myserscough Fine Art), at photo festivals (Herefordshire Photography Festival, Photo LA) and many artist-led spaces (Lewisham Art House, Whitstable Bienalle Satellite, APT gallery, Norwich Arts Centre, Elysium Gallery, Swansea). She also held residencies at the Florence Trust (2002-3), on a working sheep farm in Constable country (Rural Idyll, 2011) and ran Viewfinder, a Hospital arts photography residency for Redbridge NHS Trust.
