Kate Catterall & Lois Weinthal | Traces of Home

Two Austin artists, Kate Catterall and Lois Weinthal designed an installation, Traces of Home, that defined domesticity through landscape and interior-scape.

The domestic realm can be defined as objects and places that one identifies with ranging from the family pictures in one’s home, to the landscape that one defines as homeland. The works of Kate Catterall and Lois Weinthal jointly presented issues of domesticity and re-defined the physical and tangible meaning of home, from the micro-scale of objects inside, to the macro-scale outside and looking back to home. In Weinthal’s work, the objects associated with domesticity took on a new meaning as architecture, the container of these objects, and common materials associated with the home were investigated and challenged. The building materials of a wall were no longer secondary to the domestic realm, but rather, became the personal marks on the wall, similar to the painting that one might hang on the wall. In Catterall’s work, the landscape, the location of the home, was investigated through the lens of a 1959 Airstream travel trailer. This mobile extension of the suburban home was used to challenge notions of domesticity, place, and identity in the United States, as it claimed many landscapes for the domestic home-site and dissolved the permanence of landscape.