Catherine Eng

I am a process-focused interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, textile, performance, and video. My background in both dance and science shapes how I approach making—not as a pursuit of fixed outcomes, but as a research-based practice.

I trained for 14 years in ballet and Horton technique before shifting toward experimental and somatic forms of movement. Though my time in science was much shorter, the rigor and inquiry of that methodology remains integral to how I create. Each new work begins with a hypothesis, but its form and meaning emerge through the process itself. I do not impose content; I explore material, gesture, and time until something is revealed.

In video, this means neurotic editing—sometimes making thousands of small cuts—to create texture and reveal an impression. These works are often based on repeated performances condensed to show the conversations between iteration. My studio practice is centered on labor-intensive, textile-rooted, chimeric crafts—modular, impractical, and multipurpose objects that splice traditional techniques with nontraditional materials.

For me, capability isn’t comfort, and comfort isn’t the goal. I like the labor of making. I like seeing how far I can push material, sensation, and form. My work doesn’t aim to resolve, but instead lingers, reorients, and invites. It asks how we might find intimacy in the discarded, how sensation translates to knowledge, and how craft holds space for both rupture and repair. It’s a way for me to distort ideas of “identity" into sensational parts, breaking the objective world in favor of building a subjective one.