Photograph by Aldona Kmiec. My 'YES Quilt' and book 'Tinder Machina' (2018) installed at Backspace, Art Gallery of Ballarat, in the exhibition 'Beyond 50%' curated by Felicity Martin.
Biography
Catherine Gomersall is an Australian artist whose practice moves between personal experience and universal narratives of identity, resilience and transformation. Born and raised in Queensland, she studied commercial photography before developing an interest in the therapeutic and philosophical functions of art.
Gomersall holds a PhD in Communications from Edith Cowan University, where her research explored photography, fate and fatalism. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, alongside a career spanning arts education, curating and artist-led publishing.
After two decades of autobiographical self-portraiture exploring femininity, identity and representation, her practice expanded towards mythology, archetypes and shared experiences of adversity, healing and renewal.
Now based in Melbourne, Gomersall works across photography, drawing, painting, illustration and digital image-making.
Artist Statement
I make images about what it means to live through difficult things, to change, and to find meaning in our experiences. My work moves between the personal and the universal, drawing on autobiography, mythology, archetypes and symbolic storytelling. For much of my career, I used self-portraiture to explore femininity, identity, the body and the experience of being seen.
After two decades placing myself within the work, my focus has gradually expanded towards stories that reach beyond my own experience. I now explore recurring human narratives of struggle, resilience, transformation and healing.
This shift has brought me back to drawing and painting, while photography and digital image-making continue to inform the way I construct images. I am increasingly drawn to mythology, iconography, fables and fairytales as ways of communicating experiences that can be difficult to articulate directly.
In many ways, this feels like a return. As a child, I was captivated by the strange symbolic worlds of myths and stories. In middle age, I find myself entering those worlds again, looking for the old stories we continue to tell about how we endure, transform, lose ourselves and find our way forward.
About My Commercial Illustration Studio
Quartz Ripple is Catherine Gomersall's Melbourne-based creative studio for turning stories, ideas and original artwork into beautifully designed physical objects. Working across illustration, publishing and product design, the studio creates illustrated books, colouring books, card games, poetic cards and other artist-led publishing projects.
The studio brings together more than two decades of experience across art, photography and digital media and illustration practice. Her process moves between drawing and painting in Procreate, original photography, custom typography, and digital design as part of an artist-directed workflow.
Current projects include 'The Great Big Silage Day', an illustrated children's book created with author Jazzie Negrello, and card game projects with Constantly Fit and Githerments. At its heart, Quartz Ripple is about taking an idea beyond the screen and making it something to hold, read, collect, play with or give.