Undoing the Self: Memory, Temporality, and the Transformative Act of Painting
My work unfolds within the fluid terrain of memory, identity, and the human condition. Rooted in autobiography yet reaching toward shared experience, my practice explores memory’s capacity to distort, fragment, and reform our understanding of self, particularly through the shifting lens of childhood into adulthood. Working primarily with oil paint and pencil on board, I draw from personal archives and found images, merging them into digital compositions that serve as a foundation for my paintings. This process allows me to navigate the fragile boundaries between past and present, truth and imagination.
I am drawn to the ways time presents differently in a photographic source and in a painting. A photograph holds a moment still, while a painting embeds time through the slow, contemplative process of making. Through delicate layers of pigment and texture, I seek to capture the quiet tension between presence and absence, allowing images to blur, fade, and re-emerge in a continuous cycle of remembering and forgetting.
For most of my life, I have strived to be bold, yet this never felt entirely authentic. Through painting, I have come to embrace the gentleness that defines me, a gentleness that allows my art to reflect my inner world more truthfully. My practice has become a mirror for self-discovery; each work is a peeling back of layers toward honesty and presence. In following Rilke’s notion of living the question, I’ve come to understand that being true to myself is, perhaps, the most genuine act of courage. As a result, my paintings have become tender meditations on vulnerability, transience, and the bittersweet instability of recollection. They breathe with a quiet, luminous fragility, suggesting that identity, like memory itself, is always in motion.
Cate Laidler is an emerging artist from Naarm/Melbourne. She was a finalist in the Forty-Five Downstairs Emerging Artist Award this year.
Cate Laidler: pencil drawing process
Cate Laidler: installation view