Biography
Originally from Windsor, Ontario, Catherine Mary Stewart has lived and worked as an artist in Vancouver most of her life. She earned a BSc from the University of Toronto and a MFA from the University of British Columbia. Many of her artistic investigations, particularly of the past twenty years, relate visually and philosophically to the practices, aesthetics and history of science. Her work has won awards and been shown locally, nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions. Over the years Catherine has shared her enthusiasm for print media through artist talks and through teaching courses at Malaspina Printmakers on Granville Island and at print workshops abroad.
Venues for some of Catherine’s solo exhibitions include the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (2002) and the Glasgow Science Centre (2004). The Colour of Courtship series was shown in 2009 at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK in conjunction with the Darwin Festival. She teamed up in 2013 with Vancouver fashion historians Claus Jahnke and Ivan Sayers for the exhibition Invoking Venus: Feathers and Fashion at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia and again in 2018-19 for the Skin & Bones exhibition. These multi-faceted museum exhibitions that explored humankind’s relationship with/to the animal world were particularly rewarding for her, linking the diverse fields of visual art, natural history and fashion design. More recently, for her Orbital Theory print series, Catherine drew associations between celestial mechanics and human relations; and in her tribute piece for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, she brought together the unlikely disciplines of dressmaking and orbital mechanics. Catherine continues to take an interdisciplinary approach in her art practice by linking visual imagery from diverse sources to create what she hopes are fresh perspectives about art, science and our shared human experience.
