Cathryn Jiggens

Artist Cathryn Jiggens has been appointed as the first ‘artist in residence’ at the newly opened Courthouse arts and resource centre in Otley.

Cathryn graduated from the MA in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle in 2002. She has recently worked with the Folly Gallery in Lancaster to produce a DVD ‘Wishes from Carnforth’, which combined images of the newly restored station with archive material, and with reminiscences read by local children. This work is a gentle contemplation on nostalgia, and the impossibility of ever getting things back as they were.

In ‘The unraveller’, Cathryn unpicked heaps of discarded jumpers in a gallery. With an open circle of chairs, visitors stopped to unravel along with her, and many intimate conversations opened up between strangers simply through the activity.

In ‘Two types of felt’, she recorded on video the spaces, processes and passage of time in a felt factory in Yorkshire. She says she was, and is, transfixed by the physical and metaphysical qualities of felt. It lacks an orderly weave, and yet is formed from colourful knitwear. ‘…it seems possible for all things to emerge from and sink back into its beautiful absorbent greyness’. The video treads a line between the mundane and the transcendental.