Art as background to our lives — Cathy’s take on Colour City

Not too many artists, one suspects, find their inspiration in the old fibro Housing Commission areas of western Sydney and regional towns like Orange.

Cathy O’Donnell — who grew-up in such a suburb — sees the extraordinary in the every-day.

Orange Council is currently utilising Cathy’s special perspective with a series of ‘paste-ups’ as part of Orange’s Future City upgrade of our CBD.

Cathy is internationally-known for her “hyper-realist” works representing ubiquitous suburban architecture and is joining Yanni Pounartzis of Canberra, and Tully Moore and Sandon Gibbs-O’Neill of Orange in contributing to the first instalment of the Future City Public Art Project.

“I draw architectural features, the ones that I’m installing in Orange are ‘windows’ and ‘doors’ and are reproduced on a fine aluminium foil,” she said of her art installation.

“Basically, I’m putting ‘windows’ back where they used to be, and ‘doors’ where they have been removed, such as at the back of the Canobolas Hotel… I’m putting in seven installations in all,” she explained.

The aim, she says, is to re-humanise areas that have been built-over in recent decades.

“Council commissioned me to bring-back some of these areas, to encourage more people into the space… to re-imagine the area for entertainment, eating in,” she explained.

Her unique creations are also being-installed in Kite Street, in Post Office Lane, and in McNamara Street.

With strong links to the Colour City, she is holding a “Survey Show” — a chronology of her life’s work is at the Orange Regional Gallery next July.

She was commissioned by Council, due to the uniquely-realistic quality of her works which appear to be almost photographic in their realism.

Her special talent comes from an atypical artistic background — growing-up in the working-class suburb of Busby in the giant Housing Commission area of “Green Valley” near Liverpool in the 1970s.

“I always enjoyed drawing, but then I had a family, four children, and only rediscovered my love of art after my last child went to school,” she said.

 “A lot of my art relates really to suburbia and the fibro house I grew-up in at Busby,” she said.

In this theme then, many of the older 1970s suburban areas of Orange will be a central theme of her exhibition at the Regional Gallery.

“I’m building a big new construction for the art show here… it’s a big installation related to Orange with my inspiration from Glenroi,” she said.

“I’m interested in architecture from the mid-1900s onwards, because I grew-up in the 1960s and 1970s,” she added.

Despite its sometimes-uncannily realistic appearance, Cathy says though that her work is not intended to be a simple representation of her subject matter.

“It’s not about the photograph. The photo is a reference point from which I work… instead, I take bits and pieces of the image and create a representation of the original image,” she explained.

“My practice explores the architecture, culture, and history of the suburbs, representing the commonly-overlooked dwellings of suburbia, in an abstracted form.

“I am particularly interested in the way that the vernacular architecture and general streetscapes of the places we regularly inhabit, become recessed into our minds like wallpaper — they are at once visible and invisible,” she added. 

She has created numerous large-scale works including a full-sized house drawn on paper and the gallery walls for the Australian Drawing Biennale at the Art Gallery of NSW, a suite of large-scale tape installations of the Sirius building for Penrith Regional Gallery, a 20-metre drawing installation for Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, and a laneway activation project with Rockhampton Regional Gallery.

Her concept for the Orange installation, said: “These reproduction prints of doors, windows or entry ways would be scaled-up or down to fit into the chosen surroundings and simply pasted to the walls creating the illusion of a domestic home or dwelling amongst the bustling Orange city street becoming a portal for the imagination.” 

A teacher at the National Art School in Sydney, she, like many artists, has been impacted by the stop-start lockdowns over the past two years.

“I’ve had to do a lot of work at home because the school has been in lockdown.

“I’m lucky that I have my studio at home, but I’ve also had exhibitions cancelled or postponed… this install at Orange has been moved four times,” she laughed.

Cathy’s effort is only the first part of the project to bring outdoor art to the CBD under the Future City project, Orange Mayor, Councillor Reg Kidd said.

“Each artist has their own distinct style, and each project is very different, which means we now have an impressive variety of public art throughout the city centre.

“I look forward to seeing the city’s offering of public art grow in the future, creating yet another element to draw people into the CBD and encourage them to spend more time there,” Cr Kidd concluded.