About

About the Artist

Catherine Gomersall grew up in Rockhampton, Central Queensland, in a household shaped by creativity, mixed heritage and a community rich with diverse cultural and religious beliefs — Indigenous, immigrant, spiritual, secular. From an early age she drew and painted, absorbing the many forms the sacred takes when it moves through different hands and different traditions. In her teenage years she discovered photography, and it became her primary language for decades. She studied photography formally, then worked for many years both commercially and as an exhibiting artist, developing a practice rooted in the image and its power to shape how we understand the world. Her doctoral research — On Fate and Fatalism: Photography and Fatal Theories — explored the therapeutic role of art as a counterforce to the relentless exposure to traumatic imagery in the media. The practice-based PhD included her photographic series Femme Fatalist, which reframed the femme fatale not as a figure of danger but as a woman of autonomous power — someone who acts, rather than someone who is acted upon.That question has never left her work.In recent years Catherine returned to her earliest instincts — drawing and illustration — bringing together analogue and digital tools to create surface pattern collections and original artworks for print. Her Melbourne studio is equipped with a screen printing press, several digital devices and a range of mixed media materials. The work moves between the intimate and the monumental, the decorative and the confrontational, always with the same underlying concern: what does it look like when a woman claims her own power, in her own image, on her own terms?