Exhibition Dates
21 November > 7 February 2027
Exhibition Opening
Saturday 21 November 2026, 2 - 5PM
VISIT
Wheelchair Accessible
Assistance
Animal
Visual
Rating 75%
Quiet
Space Available
Catherine Bell has been making, exhibiting, curating, teaching and thinking about art for more than 35 years. Yet the Naarm/ Melbourne-based artist and academic’s interdisciplinary oeuvre defies easy categorisation. Her practice-led research has resulted in expansive projects, often situated within health and care contexts, as much as the white cube gallery. Outlier is the most comprehensive presentation of Bell’s work to date, and the second in Linden New Art’s series acknowledging the significant contribution of mid-career artists to Australia’s contemporary visual arts ecology.
Outlier spans the full breadth and trajectory of Bell’s practice, bringing together drawings, objects, and performance videos of the 1990s, that engage with questions of gender and the body, right through to her recent carvings made using florist oasis foam, deodorant sticks, and soap, memorialising loved ones; as well as her ongoing collaboration with Arts Project Australia artist Cathy Staughton, known as The Two Cathies. The exhibition brings together more than 40 works in a range of media, reflecting the continually evolving nature of the artist’s work, which has consistently engaged with the major, and often messy, milestones of life: birth, family, relationships and motherhood, through ageing, death, and remembering; and what it means to be a woman artist. In its scope and ambition, Outlier celebrates the career of one of the most singular and shape-shifting artists working in Australia today.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the first monographic publication dedicated to Bell’s practice, featuring newly commissioned texts by Jennifer Higgie, Dr Stephen Zagala, and exhibition curator, Hamish Sawyer.
ARTIST BIO
Catherine Bell is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and Professor in the National School of Arts and Humanities at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. She has also served as Director of the ACU Melbourne Gallery for more than two decades, where she has led an exhibition program with a long-standing commitment to social justice, inclusion, community engagement and the representation of marginalised voices.
Bell’s practice encompasses art in healthcare settings, feminist archival interventions, neurodivergent/neurotypical artistic collaboration, and the cultural, artistic and ritual dimensions of death, remembrance and memorialisation. Through socially engaged projects, she investigates how care can be articulated through relational and situated forms of creative practice, including participatory art workshops that foster death literacy. She has undertaken two year-long artist residencies in the oncology ward at St Vincent’s Hospital and at Caritas Christi Hospice in Melbourne, developing and facilitating participatory art workshops with staff, patients and their families to encourage open dialogue and meaningful reflection on death.
Since 2009, Bell has maintained an extensive creative collaboration with Arts Project Australia artist Cathy Staughton, known collectively as The Two Cathies. Their partnership has encompassed numerous creative projects, including four shared artist residencies. Their most recent Creative Australia-funded project, Dog Robot Space Star (2023), involved The Two Cathies partnering with RMIT Health Transformation Lab, becoming the first Australian artists to work with a Boston Dynamics Robot Dog.
Bell curated the NETS-supported national touring exhibition Fem-affinity (2020–21), which examined inclusive practice as a feminist mode of cultural production and was awarded a Gertrude Contemporary Studio Residency (2020–23).
Catherine Bell is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.
https://suttongallery.com.au/artists/catherine-bell/
IMAGES > Catherine Bell, Death Squad 2020-21. Catherine Bell, Felt is the present tense of feel
2006. Catherine Bell, ARE YOU A MAN OR A MOUSE MAT 2007.
