Catherine Burgess

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Catherine Burgess, “Corpus XII,” 2022

steel and cast bronze, 13” x 14” x 20” (courtesy Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton)

For an artist who made her name in formalist abstraction, Catherine Burgess has created a surprisingly delicate family of small-scale steel sculptures for her latest exhibition, Corpus, at the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton. Her sculptures are displayed on the gallery floor and many seem to cast shadows that are actually other pieces of thin metal. The works, made earlier this year, also change shape as you walk around them.

Burgess started with a central object, often repurposed from an older work or left-over materials, and then added another component. The resulting minimalist works are simple and unadorned, activated by perspective and tensions in negative space, rather than by complex textures. They also play in various ways with materials and geometry, offering an unexpected fragility. 

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Catherine Burgess, “Corpus VII,” 2022

steel and stone, 5” x 8” x 5” (courtesy Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton)

Burgess has made art for 45 years and boasts a legacy as one of the few female abstract metal sculptors active in Alberta during the ’80s and ’90s. She remains respected, with accomplishments that include a 30-year survey in 2019 at Gallery@501 in Sherwood Park, near Edmonton. Last year, she showed work made from 2017 to 2020 at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge.

The works in this latest show, on view in Edmonton from Sept. 22 to Oct. 8, invite viewers to crouch down to examine the relationships between textures, colours and shapes. Some compositions tease the brain. For instance, her cubes aren’t square and change shape depending on your viewing angle. Watching a hand pass through one is disconcerting. And the stillness of the materials contrasts delightfully with active looking.

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Catherine Burgess, “Corpus X,” 2022

steel, 12” x 25” x 6” (courtesy Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton)

These days, Burgess works primarily with mild steel, which can bend and rust. She has also worked with wood, bronze, stone, aluminum and stainless steel. Over the years, she has amassed a variety of objects and materials. 

“I’ve now and then tried to incorporate them in my constructed pieces but without satisfactory resolution,” she says. “There they have sat on dusty shelves or piled in corners, familiar remnants, waiting for their time.”

Since each work in Corpus began with a leftover piece, each sculpture is unique, she says. “Most of them are comprised of only one other, more minor element, at most two. The effect of this simple combination elevates them from disparate remainders to whole works.”

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Catherine Burgess, “Corpus IV,” 2022

found cast iron chalice and grindstone, 10” x 6” x 6” (courtesy Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton)

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Catherine Burgess, “Corpus II,” 2022

steel, 11” x 4” x 16” (courtesy Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton)

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Burgess says she prefers to look rather than think while she creates – the thinking comes afterward when experiencing the results. Instead of the durable modular designs of many of her male contemporaries, she plays with the personal, relational and formal elements of her materials, allowing subconscious meanings to surface organically. Her work is full of surprising dichotomies: soft and hard, tender and rigid, static and ephemeral, to name a few. The conversations between these seeming opposites encourage viewers to stay a little longer, to become friends. ■

Catherine Burgess, Corpus, at the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton from Sept. 22 to Oct. 8, 2022.

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