nest

Born in Italy and raised in Australia from the age of four, Katthy Cavaliere’s work encompasses performance, installation and photography, and explores personal narratives, often by using the artist’s personal possessions and through her obsessive self-documentation.

Cavaliere's parents and childhood are reoccurring subject matter for her work. The death of her mother to ovarian cancer, the same disease which would claim the artist’s life three years’ later, inspired the work 'nest'. Using her mother’s clothing, Cavaliere constructs a nest on a rocky cliff at Clovelly Beach in Sydney, a place she often visited with her mother. Naked but for her mother’s stockings on her head, the film captures the fluttering of the stocking and the series of movements performed by the artist.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham wrote: “In the same way the childhood objects of her early installations were connective tissue to a forgotten origin story, what her mother left behind became the raw material used to reattach the umbilical cord. All the symbolic or literal imagery of the ‘home’ that had accumulated so far in Katthy’s practice was distilled at the end in a ‘nest’ created from her mother’s clothes.”1

1 Mudie Cunningham, 'Kathy Cavaliere' 2016, p 42