Catherine Wagner

HOMESCAPES: matter + thought

2022 - 2023

Architecture has long been a line of inquiry within my practice. I was invited to the Mary Heaton Vorse House in Provincetown, MA, an 18th century home which became a refuge for New York creatives during the turn of the century. While in residence, I performed interventions, using painter’s tape to visually reference architectural blueprints and create abstract drawings in situ. Citing the home’s idiosyncratic structure as a catalyst, I constructed newly imagined geometries. My process is highly intuitive, with one line informing the next, allowing me to respond to the space in the moment. The tape drawing is integrated into the space, allowing the architecture’s form, texture, and patterns to become equally weighted with my interventions.

The photograph finalizes the process by flattening the architectural space and the drawing together. The in situ drawing is erased and the image becomes evidence.

Taken as a whole, this body of work regards the built environment as a palimpsest of human intention. It argues for the signifying capacity of vernacular architecture, which I then respond to with my own interventions. I further the idea that old and new always intermix; as scholar Emilia Mickevicius has observed of the work, it posits the “contemporary” as a condition of relating to time that may foreground the present, yet is consistently in dialogue with the past. In the contexts of architecture, language, and history, one never starts from scratch—one is inevitably referencing preexisting conditions and systems.