2025 Recap
yep, it is 2026 but I am wintering....
Wonderful Family Photos | Photographer: Austin Day
2025 was a whirlwind! Aren’t they all?
Upon reflection, I realized that last Christmas (2024), we were waiting for my mom’s surgery. Fast forward to March 2025, when she was living with us and getting radiation. She is doing well, with a recent scan being clear of cancer! Praise the Lord and Fuck cancer! I was so thankful to celebrate Christmas 2025 festivities with her and my dad in the usual fashion at Slowalk place - stuffed with too much food and packing the car with too many gifts!
Here are some highlights of 2025:
Very top of my list was being curated into this amazing exhibition PERFECTION: a question of repair at the Penland Gallery in North Caroline. Guest curator: Celia Pym.
Selected repairs from The Collective Mending Sessions and a few of my Labor Objects were curated into this amazing exhibition. Zach and I visited Penland. It warmed my heart to be in that neck of the woods again. I could not shake the confident feeling of a returning again and again. Read more about Labor Objects here.
We even saw my old mending friend Catherine Murphy. From NYC and further back Ireland, she was an early mender in The Collective Mending Sessions, has a great substack “A Letter: A Running Stitch”, and wrote about visiting the PERFECTION exhibit at Penland.
Iowa Artist/Mother Collective
Iowa Artist/Mother Collective is going strong. All self-identifying artist/mothers are welcome! Check it out and consider joining. More information on my website.
My co-wrangler and I are meeting next week to get our heads around 2026 events! More exhibitions (!), artist meet-ups, studio visits, and more artist panels. Stay tuned.
Solo Exhibition!
lightlightlightlightlightlight | Fall 2025, Grand View University, Ames, IA
I was so pleased to exhibit four new works thanks to a grant from the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Spring Exhibitions in Des Moines
My amazing artist friend Kathranne curated me into Oh, Repetition! | Moberg Gallery, shown alongside her solo exhibition. I sold two pieces!
The ever-supportive Olson-Larsen Galleries curated my work into Art & Ecology in April. I was also fortunate to restart The Collective Mending Sessions with OL as host!
More than once this year, I heard the refrain, “You're doing so much art!”. Well, I am a FULL-TIME PROFESSIONAL WORKING ARTIST after all. There is more than I can fit here. Contemporary Craft Exhibition: Materials Hard + Soft, Denton, TX. Juror for Exhibited at PCHG. Included in the online, international This is Essential Work exhibition. Almost a finalist for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (so close!). IAMAS Conference in Boston. Grinnell Visiting Artist! Visiting Artist at SWCC & a successful mending session! Mentorship to start the year with IAC. Made my first outfit from a pattern. Ireland family visits. Went to Arkansas. Plethora of studio visits with curators and artist friends. Artworks sold. Rejections received. Reached over $1,000 in support here on my Substack, Topography of Dwelling. Lost my long time kitty friend, Widget. Got a new kitten to ease the pain, Hildegard.
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I have closed my webshop and my Patreon. In 2026, I am focusing on getting financial support for my studio practice through artist gigs and on SUBSTACK. So if you have been reading these, take the leap and put some cheddar in my bowl. (That means $ for all you young things).
Here are some questions from my 2025 sketchbook I am pondering in 2026:
What if space and time were measured differently?
Bodily chronology. An emboided archeology.
What if time were measured by how long I can hold my breath underwater?
Or the length of a table leg?
Or the string distance from hand to heart?
Measured by the spindly chair legs. An empire of imagination.
The END, For Now, More to Come - Love Catherine!