Catherine O’Donnell, Gold leafed house number 5, 2022, , from the Golden House series, stereolithographic model and gold leaf, 14 x 25 x 20 cm, Courtesy the artist 

In the hands of artist, Catherine O’Donnell, the votive, golden offering of a fibro house that you can hold in the palm of two hands, becomes a reliquary, a container for the holy relics of childhood memories. Memories that are always more complex, more special, and more formative than we realise at the time.

O’Donnell is best known for her charcoal drawings, which range from a life sized, charcoal drawing of a fibro house, to small, exquisitely rendered, graphite and charcoal drawings, almost always of buildings with modest ambitions.

O’Donnell draws with not only a fastidious attention to detail, but with a loving and deeply thoughtful attention to detail.  Her works while clearly representational, are never photorealistic. Catherine is drawn to the underlying geometry of her subjects, be that suburban carparks or social housing. As a child and young adult, Catherine lived in Green Valley, and recounts that she always loved the geometry of the fibro panels, a ubiquitous material in the low-income housing development her childhood memories are framed by.

Take away all the social, cultural, and political references that fibro conjures up and what her artists eye sees is the elegance of the geometric forms. Whilst she draws realistically with razor-sharp attention to detail, such as counting the bricks in the block of flats that were the subject for Still lives (see below). She also often removes extraneous details like rooves and piers, which has the effect of displacing these buildings from their immediate environment and allowing the essential geometric forms wrapping around the facade of the building to remains the hero.

The title Still lives tips it’s hat at the genre of still life painting, where artists paint inanimate objects, these could be vases of flowers, skulls, books etc.  except, Still Lives as a multiple, is also evocative and slightly ominous, suggesting multiple lives in statis. The collective ‘s’ complicates our reading of the title. We know the visible subject of the drawing is low-income housing from the mid C20, and the title provokes us to consider the multiple possible interpretations of the building as various lives play out inside of it…

Catherine O’Donnell, Still Lives, 2021, charcoal and graphite on paper, 31.4 x 100cm, Courtesy of the artist

This is an excerpt of a lecture I gave at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in July 2023. I am currently developing a regional tour of my lecture series, based on this blog: How to start a love affair with art.