One of my favourite artworks by Katthy was a story of a girl performance installation at Art Space in Sydney.
“Story of a girl is a work that attempts to make present what has been experienced abstractly, exploring issues of self-documentation and personal history. I have assembled on the gallery floor an extensive collection of personal objects which I have stored over the years, objects that chronicle my childhood. These recontextualised objects are vessels that excavate and document stories of my past, making them available for interpretation and closure.” Katthy Cavaliere
Katthy was a dear friend of mine since art school days at college of fine arts in Sydney in the nineties. My fondest memory of her was when I helped her with an installation the day( we were up past midnight finishing it) before dropping her artwork off at Artspace for the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship that she won which I think was fifty thousand dollars and she used it to travel to Italy the country of her birth and she made amazing performances and installations and photos there.
My next favourite installation of hers was at Artspace where she transferred her bedroom that she had lived in since being a child into a big cardboard box the exact same dimensions and she would go there every day and lie on her bed doing the usual things she did in her bedroom like writing in her journal. It was called Katthys room made in 1998.
Another fond memory I have was co curating and exhibiting in a short artist film night at the then Performance Space in Redfern. There were over twenty films on the night by different artists.
Before she died, she organised her money to a scholarship for female artists in the medium of performance and installation hybrid. Each grant is for 100k.
