Catherine Evans: Studio Inspiration No. 2

Catherine Evans is another artist in my building whose work I admire. When I describe her work to people I usually say something like, "It's not the kind of thing one could easily hang in their home, but it's the kind of thing that needs to be made and seen." Is she a painter? Yes. Is she a sculptor? Yes. Is she a recycler? Absolutely. All the work is abstract and seems to have some element of repetition. She uses tons of recycled materials—old soda bottles, bottle caps, yogurt cups.

When I see her work, my auditory system gets triggered—there's a rhythm to what she makes. I hear the high keys on a piano, fog horns, branches scraping against branches. I love that.

Catherine has a solo show in our gallery going on right now. She also got a grant to offer a couple of workshops. The first workshop was working with marker on a type of composite-wood panel. There's a large piece in the show that was done with this technique. It's a great piece. I made sure I was at the workshop. So I got to make a little something inspired by her work, and that something ended up as a gift for someone the very same day.

The materials were left out, so yesterday, when the studio was quiet, I went and made another. This time, instead of the conversation that bubbled through the air as we worked, I had silence and my own breathing. The circles that I was drawing stopped being circles. I briefly imagined them as hats as seen from above. Then I saw people below them. Then they just became people in a space or across the globe. No two are alike. Well, actually, two of them ended up the same, but these things happen. They're at opposite ends, anyway.

It was a nice little meditation and I liked that something that started as random circles started to mean more to me.