Katthy Cavaliere

My desk is on the 13th floor of Mathews Building on the UNSW Kensington campus. Floors 11 - 14 is for IT staff where I currently work as a Change Lead. (I know, I know. I can barely lead myself to water let alone be part of major infrastructure projects but there you have it.) I digress. The other day I took the elevator to Lvl 5 for a lunch-and-learn session about UNSW’s art collection.

Revelatory.

Our first stop was a large photo that covered an entire wall. It was a picture of the first graduation ceremony at UNSW originally known as the New South Wales University of Technology. It is a black and white photo with a building looming on the left side of the picture and squatting on the bottom right are the seated graduates for that year. And not a woman among them. In the middle distance is Barker St and it takes a moment to realise you’re looking at the hill that runs eastward towards Botany Rd. The photo was the perfect jumping off point for the art collection because, no surprises, as the eras change - so too does the university’s take on what is considered ‘relevant’ and ‘collectible’. By the early oughts the university is well into women and indigineous art - hello Richard Bell etal but it was a work by the artist Katthy Cavaliere that stopped me cold.

It’s a series of still photos and a video installation of a woman facing the ocean with her back towards the camera and seated on a pile of clothes with pantyhose holding her long hair in a bun. Save for the stockings, she is naked and the video is filtered to give it the slightly faded and out-of-focus 70s documentary vibe. The viewers looks at it half expecting something more to happen other than a woman taking a whole lot of clothing out of a bag and eventually sitting on that pile naked. So far, so what, I think.

The film is part of a series of works on the rituals of love in remembrance of her mother who died of breast cancer. And immediately I go from mildly interested to here comes grief and the utter lack of any memorial that I have to mourn my parents’ deaths. And I am the bad daughter because what have I put in place that properly honours my Mum & Dad? And now this lunch time tour plunges me into something that I’m really not ready for. It’s too much because the images that Katthy uses to depict her grief are viscerally understood but not really, but a little bit, but OK a whole damn lot because there are parallels I draw of my mother and the ocean that I can’t ignore. Those flickering scenes of this artist staring at the great ocean into that vast nothingness are tapping into something way too much for me.

This is what art is supposed to do I tell myself as I swallow the knot in my throat. Roll with it. Suffer on it.

Side note; Katthy Cavaliere died of the same disease that took her mother not two years afterwards.

1972-2012