I am interested in where we come from and the places we love and inhabit. When I turned 65 I wanted to know about my ancestors so I sent off a DNA sample and was surprised and delighted to find I was 51 percent Celtic and 41 percent Scandanavian, and with Italian,Spanish and Greek for the rest. My ancestors lived by the sea in Cornwall, and some came from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Scandanavians are seafaring people. One of my early dreams was ancient artefacts being washed up on Days Bay beach. They looked Roman! 
I grew up in a coastal settlement of Eastbourne in Lower Hutt. My early memories are of beaches in Auckland. My adolescent hopes and dreams I put into poems. My paintings are like landscapes of the mind and often have elements of the sea.
When I was 19 the death of a friend plunged me into sorrow and my work is often about working my way towards the light and giving a permanence to those early dreams of love. I have a story to publish called Sunshine road with similar themes.

My work was recently inspired by a bout of bad weather.
One wild and windy Wellington night the TV began producing pixallated images. The pixallations spluttered across the screen
for some time and then stopped randomly only to start up again. The wild distortions of the images and changing bands of
colour were my weird gift from the wind to the wire. I ran to get my cell phone and captured some of the fast changing images.
I printed them off and for the next year or so I stayed with them.Imagining how I would paint them.I added doodling though liked the raw images better. I paint my first painting  of the series in  in 2019. 'Everything and all' was pictured  recently on Art New Zealand face book page. I had spent 15 months in Auckland in Laingholm, a seaside settlement near Titirangi. It was a perfect place to paint, work on films and to start a novel in between covid lockdowns.

Catherine has work in both private and public collections. Public collections include the Christchurch Law Society and Timaru's Aigantighe gallery. She has a BA and a DFA. She was a finalist in the 2006 Adam Portraiture Award, Greater Wellington regional art award in 2018 and the Whirinaki Whare Taonga Wellington Arts Review.