Bio
Catherine Manchester is an abstract and figurative artist from Wellington, New Zealand. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Docter in Fine Arts. Her paintings often have elements of the sea; she thinks of them as “landscapes of the mind.” Her current and ongoing body of work is inspired by a wild and windy Wellington night when her TV began producing pixelated images.
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.
Catherine grew up in a coastal settlement of Eastbourne in Lower Hutt. Her early memories are of beaches in Auckland. As a teenager, she wrote her hopes and dreams into poems. When she was 19, the death of a friend plunged her into sorrow and her work is often about working her way towards the light and giving a permanence to those early dreams of love.
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 Scandinavian, 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 Scandinavians are seafaring people. One of my early dreams was ancient artefacts being washed up on Days Bay beach. They looked Roman!
Catherine is a writer and poet, as well as an artist. She 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 Art Gallery. 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.