2027 Brightwork Fellowship Finalist Award
For the first time, the Brightwork Fellowship Board of Directors has created an additional opportunity in order to recognize the work of a finalist for the 2027 Brightwork Fellowship.
The mission of Brightwork is to demonstrate to North Carolina artists, through tangible support, that they are valued, worthy of investment, and that the voice they bring to the cultural discourse of our state is a vital facet of North Carolina's identity. We support artists at all stages of their careers and are particularly excited to support the work of finalist Catherine Edgerton at this pivotal point in her professional development.
As the recipient of the Finalist Award, Catherine will receive a three month residency at Anchorlight, a solo exhibition in our gallery, and a financial award of $10,000.00.
Catherine Edgerton
Bio
Catherine Edgerton is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer whose practice grows from relationships with coral reefs, collective imagination, and world-building. Born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, she spends half her time at sea. Her trade as a sailor and dive instructor is a portal through which she maintains relationships with coral reefs and underwater worlds.
Creating much of her work in and with community, Edgerton co-initiated the Durham Art Asylum, which builds creative pathways between folks who struggle with mental health and addiction in Durham, North Carolina. From this work sprang the uprise of multiple social practice projects and collaborations that employ kaleidoscopes, SCUBA diving, and performance to engage abolitionist practices with a creative lens. She is the lead organizer of Queen Street Magic Boat, a mixed-use art space and surrealist hub for building and sustaining visionary community connections through water, the arts, and wild imagination.
Artist Statement
I’m a multi-disciplinary and social practice artist whose work reveals connections between grief, colonialism, sanity, and identity. Using materials that range from graphite and gold leaf to film slides, brake lights, and snake skins, I cut, paint, stitch, illuminate, and reassemble, inviting perspective-shifting and imagination. I create mixed-media handbound books, sculptural kaleidoscopes, paintings, drawings, and installations that draw from my experiences with psychiatric institutions as well scuba diving. My work illuminates threads between disparate entities and concepts, such as sanity, coral bleaching, and carcerality. I then use these threads to weave luminous new worlds.
My approach is rooted in an apprenticeship to the natural and material world. I greet teachability and unknowing as ethical practices, entering into reciprocal relationships with materials, ecologies, and communities. I surrender to the unpredictable wisdom of underwater environments, the materials that I use, dreams, and collective processes. My work translates this wisdom into invitations toward interdependence, belonging, and worlds beyond isolation and harm.
My social practice uplifts collaborative rigorous, and joyful community work. Through collaborations with organizations such as Queen Street Magic Boat, the Durham Art Asylum, and Gallery of the Streets, I create happenings that center the subconscious, the surreal, the wild, and the relational with the purpose of building abolitionist futurity. Using multi-logues, facilitation, sliding scale + trauma-informed scuba instruction, teach-ins, underwater performance, music, Creative Psychiatric Advance Directives, and spatial practices, this work catalyzes principled action, collective world-building, and magic.
Across disciplines, my work asks, ‘what are the conditions we need for care, world-building, and principled action?’ I explore how we imagine collective liberation, and invite others into the joy of making it real.
Work by Catherine Edgerton
