About the Artist
Gail Catlin is an internationally acclaimed artist who currently resides in Cape Town, South Africa. Using a dynamic harmony of mixed media, alchemy and expressionism, Gail is the only artist in the world who has perfected the technique of using liquid crystal in an art form.
Liquid crystals are infinitely flexible and fluid enabling transformational art technology with mesmerising qualities. This highly sensitive substance responds immediately to changing intensities of temperature and light with dramatic shifts in colour, reflectivity and sheen providing a constantly changing live pictorial surface.
Gail Catlin’s CV:
1983: Accepted for Master’s Degree at Royal College of Art London
National and International competitions:
1979: Cape town Biennial – South African National Gallery
1981: South African Day Republic Day festival – Durban
1981: First Cape Town triennial – South African National Gallery
1985: Women Artist of South Africa – South African National Gallery
1989: South African women paper Exhibition
1990: Standard Bank Natinal Drawing Competition
1991: Grand Prix International art Plastiques – Nice France – Award winner of landscape category
1993: Momentum Art – Biennial – South Africa
1994: Grand Prix International art Plastiques – Nice France – Award winner
1998: Art beyond Borders – Rathaus Augsberg – Germany, represented South Africa, a travelling exhibition
1999: One woman solo show – South African Embassy London
1999: Solo Show – Osborne studio – London.
2000- Exhibited on many group shows. Installed sculpture, conceptual and installations in various public spaces.
2008: Solo Exhibition Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town
2009: One Woman exhibition – Dubai
2010: University Kaust- Kaust Museum Middle East- 2 liquid crystal installations
2019: Solo Exhibition at The Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town
2019-2020: Cheetah Plains Game Lodge, Sabie Sabie - large collection of Bronze’s & paintings in their art collection.
———
From 2010 - 2020:
For the last 10 years, Gail has exhibited at various galleries throughout South Africa and internationally. The list of galleries include Walker Bay Modern (her main gallery), Everard Read Gallery Cape Town, Everard Read Gallery Gauteng, Kalk Bay Modern Art, Smac Gallery Cape Town, Stellenbosch Die Kunsgallery, Manzart Franshoek & Isart Gallery Stellenbosch.
———
Public Collections:
Pulitzer Collection, St Louis, USA
Royal College of Art, London, UK
South African National Gallery, Cape Town, RSA
Johannesburg Art Gallery, RSA
Pretoria Art Museum, RSA
Durban Art Gallery, RSA
Polokwane Art Museum, RSA
Stellenbosch University Collection, RSA
South African Reserve Bank Collection, RSA
South African Reserve Bank, Pretoria, RSA
South African Department of Education and Training, Pretoria, RSA
Public Library Collection, Cape Town, RSA
Good Hope Bank of South Africa, Cape Town, RSA
Constitutional Court, Pretoria, RSA
Demarco European Art Foundation, Edinburgh, UK
Kaust Science Museum, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Ellerman House Collection, Cape Town, RSA
Gail Catlin's Bio - Excerpt from Die Kunskamer Gallery (2012)
Gail Catlin was born in March 1948. She started working with bronze, but made a name for herself in the South African art world with her liquid crystal paintings.
To quote Lin Sampson "When Gail Catlin started talking about her art, her eyes changed blues at such an alarming rate she might have been connected to an unreliable electricity supply." How prescient those words were, not only with respect to Eskom's woes (the South African electricity suppliers), but also to the nature of Catlin's art.
It is no exaggeration to say that Gail Catlin is the first, and possibly also the only, artist to use liquid crystal as the principal medium in her art. The question that begs an answer is: why would she choose to use such a difficult and elusive medium?
While Catlin lived in Arniston, she became fascinated, but also frustrated, by the nacreous quality of sea shells and mother-of-pearl, and was convinced that a new colour spectrum needed to be developed to capture the subtle and ever-changing shades of Nature. She also realized that she was more fascinated by the colour spectrum of the moon than of the sun.
She experimented with clays and resins and fiberglass, which played nicely with light, but only when used in sculptural form. She wanted to paint with materials that played with light. Her aim was no less than to capture the most elusive of nuances, the most intangible subtleties of Nature, but she was frustrated by the inadequacies of the traditional media of oil paint, acrylics and water-colour.
While at the Royal College of Art in London, she visited the Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine, and asked the boffins there how she could capture the pearly colour of sea shells. They advised her to use a mirror to split white light into the colour spectrum, as al-Haytham and Isaac Newton had done many years before.
But Catlin wasn't satisfied with this explanation. She made contact with a Dr Cyril Hilsum at General Electric, who was a world expert on liquid crystal; it was he who first introduced her to liquid crystal. Together, as student and mentor, they set off on a symbiotic journey of discovery, the results of which we see in Catlin’s work today.
The beauty of liquid crystals, from an artist's point of view, is that they are infinitely flexible and fluid, and can be painted onto an artwork, It's like painting with liquid diamonds.
Through painstaking experimentation over many enormously frustrating years, both in England and South Africa, Catlin gradually began to master the fugitive alchemy of liquid crystals. She learned how to capture iridescence and lustre, as well as the changing diel and seasonal moods of landscapes and objects.
She began to paint with liquid crystals in such a way that she could anticipate their responses, to light, to temperature and to each other. A magical relationship developed between the artist and her medium, lying midway between predictable science and fickle art, but the process of discovery and understanding was still ongoing.
For many years Catlin produced mainly dark, nocturnal colours from the medium, and struggled to create the kind of lighter palette she needed to evoke her chosen terrain, the sun-baked African plain. She eventually resolved this problem, partly by accident (as all great discoveries are made), by painting on tippled, white paper. She sent a sample to Dr Hilsum, who noted that the crystals rested at a slight angle towards each other and found that, the more you angle the crystals, the more you enhance their ability to reflect light in different directions. This produces a greater degree of optical shimmer and colour contrast, with each crystal acting like a miniature prism.
The use of a white background also released a whole new spectrum of softer, lighter colours.
What Catlin has now achieved is quite extraordinary. As Fabbrizzio von Grebner has rightly stated, Catin's personal contribution to world art is that her works have achieved a kind of metastasis — the ability of the artwork to escape fixity and to constantly transform itself like a kaleidoscope. She has achieved this by simultaneously being an alchemist, scientist, magician and artist.
She has also, on an unprecedented scale, worked closely with some of the best scientists and technologists in the world in the field of liquid crystals in order to obtain a full understanding of her magical medium. She is probably also one of the first artists to venture into the realm of nanotechnology, the study and manipulation of materials at the molecular level.
Catlin has produced a unique body of work, not only in terms of her abstract imagery or dramatic chromatic effects, but also because of the lively responsiveness of her artworks to the viewer.
Gail Catlin has possibly come closer than anyone to capturing the infinitely varied iridescence and colour spectrum, not only of the pearl, but also of the African landscape. She has short-circuited millions of years of evolution and solved one of the secrets of Nature.