Catherine Walker

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2025 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Degree

Catherine Walker is a multidisciplinary artist and educator, based in New Orleans, with a background in design. Through her work, Catherine employs familial evangelical histories and memory as a lens for interrogating binary gender ideology and performance. Her most recent work examines how the concept of protection—an alluring idea, draped in a mirage of gentility—is utilized as a formulaic control mechanism in patriarchal cultural systems. Catherine is a Masters in Fine Art candidate through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a Master of Arts from NYU Steinhardt, Department of Art and Art Professions. Her work has been shown in New York, Washington, DC, Houston, and New Orleans.

Catherine Walker - Darling, You Wreck Me

Darling, You Wreck Me, Acrylic Paint on Canvas.

Release The Dark, Acrylic Paint on Upholstered Canvas.

Catherine Walker - Your Feet Move On Mine

Your Feet Move On Mine, Acrylic Paint on Canvas.

Hold On Too Tightly, Acrylic Paint on Canvas.

My work utilizes abstraction as a seductive fabricator of liberative aspirations. These pieces evoke a longing to be free from prescripted roles and ideals. Dissected stuffed animals, costumes and lingerie—distilled into shiny, squishy, sparkly, and smooth—dance with canvas layered in paint, performing a garish sensuality. Material movement and flow become transgressive conductors crossing ideological boundaries of gendered archetypes. Often based on couture design structure, visceral shapes and forms require a visual dialogue between material dualities and tensions—transparency and opacity, gravity and ethereality, delicacy and force, allure and abject. There is a suggested conflict between constriction and breakage in my work. The potential for ideological and bodily rupture.

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