Catherine Bainbridge: CONTINUUM

Catherine Bainbridge: CONTINUUM

Catherine Bainbridge: Continuum is a gentle yet explorative tribute to East Gippsland, its waterways, lands and skies. Spanning eight decades of works, the exhibition evokes the artist’s connection to the elements and ecosystems from her youth to adulthood.

Growing up on the Gippsland Lakes, Catherine remembers the remoteness, the long drawn‑out strands of scenery and the immensity of the sky delivering warmth, the lakes still as mirrors, the turbulent storms, the rising seas.

Building an intimate connection with place, she started noticing the channels marked by lights at night, the sandbanks, the good anchorages and the places offering shelter from prevailing winds. Later, she explored the hinterland, the lazy, looping downstream rivers through green pastures of rich farming country, bordered by the grey‑greens of the bush.

As Catherine climbed higher, a new world opened, often as remote as the lakes had been. Little frequented, the roads curved and climbed through mapped places named, yet seemingly uninhabited. She encountered forests pristine and ancient, surely untouched since time began, stretching from ferns and lichens to the canopy alive with screaming birds.

All of this became part of her. She sought solitude to paint, draw and think. Her gratitude for the land grew and she wondered how many others long before herhad looked upon it. She thought particularly of the women who sought shelter, foraged and grew food, raised children and lived their lives; sustained by the land or succumbed to its challenges. Standing beside an immense tree in Errinundra, older than white settlement, she felttheir spirit.

This body of work is her tribute to all that is, and her gratitude for having been a tiny part of it. Her art is her language. She invites viewers to feel with her.

Image description: Calico cloth, acrylic paint, commercial dyes, paraffin wax, pearl cotton.
Catherine Bainbridge, Fullaton Wetlands, 2025