Catherine Caldwell’s love of steel

“I just feel I've found my thing,” says Catherine Caldwell. “You know, I just love working with metal.”

Orange City Life got in touch with Catherine after spying her welded steel sculpture of a dancer in the Orange Regional Gallery’s HERE/NOW Exhibition, which features a diverse range of work from 130 professional and amateur local artists.

“I've got to go back and have a much closer look,” says Catherine of the exhibition. “I love that there were such different mediums — mosaics, the differences in painting styles, and the other sculptures were beautiful too.”

Exhibiting her own work is not something Catherine has had a tendency to do, she tells me. But after being convinced by a friend to submit a piece for Mudgee’s Sculptures in the Garden last year, Catherine’s “Ava” was given the People’s Choice Award.

“That was heartening!” says Catherine. “And I thought well, maybe I should keep going… and so now I haven't stopped really.”

It was only just three years ago that Catherine first picked up a welding gun. Art and sculpture was something she’d done in High School, but between work and raising five children there’d been little time for much else.

“I'm just now sort of dabbling in something that I've always wanted to get to,” she says. “My husband and I, we've raised five children and we've been pretty busy! We have only just become empty nesters and, not that I wish them to go, but for the first time I've been able to spend a bit more time doing art, just something that I've been busting to do.

“It was my friend Jenny, she asked me if I would attend welding classes with her at TAFE… We were surrounded by young guys doing trades and I was sort of lassoing these guys going past into my welding bay to make sure I was going to blow everyone up!

“So it started there with both of us together and I love it!”

Both the piece in the HERE/NOW exhibition and that submitted to Mudgee last year are of dancing figures, a theme repeated in works around Catherine’s home and garden.

“I don't know how I started out doing dancers, but I just love watching the fluidity of dance, it's beautiful art form. I started off doing one dancer and that sort of triggered ideas for other types of dance sculptures, but I plan to get off the dancing theme,” she says.

“I've been sort of curious about wanting to try some other forms like I love abstract contemporary pieces…. So I’m wanting to do something different, keen to try something new.”

Catherine’s workshop is home to numerous bits of old steel farm equipment and odds and ends she has accumulated over the years.

“I love the textures in the old metals; you don't see that in the new metal. I have always appreciated the textures that you see in nature… I'm not afraid to be imperfect, because I don't want to manufactured looking piece. I love all the irregularities and the intersections. It is why I love working with metal.”

When asked if she would like to put on her own exhibition, Catherine says that’s not really why she does what she does.

“I've been asked that by quite a few people of late, but this was only ever meant to be a pastime… I'm looking forward to retirement and having something that I can do, that I love to do! I find it really relaxing to go to the shed and just immerse myself in creating a piece, but, no, exhibitions haven’t really entered my head — that's not what I set out to do.

“We’ve been busy with family, busy working, but now we're pulling back and doing stuff that we love to do.”