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Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Catrin Rhiannon Steward: Between My Homeless Clavicles curated by Caroline Koebel.
Treatment for metastatic breast cancer entailed removal of the artist’s upper sternum; thus, her collarbone no longer attached to her breastbone. The exhibition title originates on Steward’s @love_energy_walking when she repurposes a jarring encounter with a medical provider into a chance to spread awareness about care ethics.
My nurse was taking my vitals. She suddenly reaches toward the (raw and sacred) place between my homeless clavicles.
The nurse proceeds to take Catrin’s necklace in her hand.
I am sharing this to remind all healers: If you have permission to be in the personal space of a client or patient, it is still personal space. Be aware that a person’s trauma history can affect how they are able to receive touch or other gestures of intimacy.
Catrin’s personal, poetic, practical, and philosophical explication — through language and vision — of what it means to be alive while enduring stage 4 cancer is a love letter to her “fellow cancerians.”
The triumph is just existing. And experiencing the flow of pleasure and pain that emerges.
Her conscious self-presentation also acts as an empathic beacon for non-cancerians to envisage how best to affirm and support from an external vantagepoint.
All the plants and plantish things and all their relationships were there for me to love. All the feelings of missing out on the outside, of being trapped by my illness and unable to access the freedom of nature - were finally lifting and I felt what I know, that beauty is always all around me and within me. I felt connected and so happy.
I’m indebted to the late Carolee Schneemann for guiding me on how to be the best friend possible to a person with cancer:
It will be so helpful for you to be with Catrin. As for my overcoming cancer… that is never an assumption. I don’t know how severe or advanced the cancer is with Catrin, but you have to support her, whatever decision she has chosen or been forced to accept. Certainly do some research on alternative therapies, which can only help. Being with her will be positive…
Invoking Carolee here is a heartening act. Knowing that toward the end of her life, she exhibited on these very walls only makes it more so.
Within this forest is a dazzling world of flowers within flowers.
In her diagnosis years, Catrin has led a deep inquiry into the coalescence of aesthetic sense and the marvels of the natural world. She has reassessed her tools and modes and come to the determination to be as lo-fi and lightweight as possible. She upgraded her phone and added a macro lens, and onto the beckoning trail into the forest or meander across the field she continued to go.
I started late and underestimated the distance. My chest was hurting and my eyes were strangely tired. This is why I hike alone. Sweaty and blundering. No time to talk. Just discovery, wonder and beauty, beauty, beauty.
Catrin’s predilection for “crouching around” in the nearby-ness to nature as time suspends is the embodied foundation for her mesmerizing eye.
Imagine being a tiny pollinator exploring this apparently colossal space.
She does not rush beauty, and beauty rewards her sustained and continuous presence by finding its way to her.
In the woods, I told myself I’d go back for better pictures. But the better picture lives in my weirdo heart along with renewed faith in the alchemy of devotion.
Catrin Rhiannon Steward: Between My Homeless Clavicles is on view through July 8 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
• Catrin was integral in the creation of this exhibit. She died on June 7. We celebrate her spirit and legacy.
