Cat Roissetter British, b. 1984

b. London. Lives and works in Sheffield.
 

Cat Roissetter has become most known for her individual, affecting and experimental works on paper in coloured pencil, graphite and crayon.  Also working across painting and printmaking, Roissetter's viusal language mobilises influences that extend from Rubens to Henry Darger. Roissetter’s early work was characterised by experiments with material degradation: bleaching, tarnishing and weathering her paper using techniques drawn from  early photographic printing, before excavating from these harried surfaces her mnemonic images.
 
Moving away from the ‘weathering’ techniques of her earliest work,  her more recent works on paper can be more recently typified by Roissetter’s distinctive practice of sluicing her paper with cooking oil: a process that emboldens lines and develops the abstracting effects of the carbon paper. Affording accidental marks the same level of sensitivity as the deliberate, Roissetter deploys intricate lines and splashes of vibrant colour to offset her representations of fleshy, cherubic characters, developing her interest in pattern and repetition in a way that sees the particular bleed into abstract. These labour-intensive drawing methods are part of a unique visual language, where distortion of form is a symptom of the gradual degeneration of materials and an intensity of observation that verges on the neurotic.
 
Roissetter’s work draws on diverse range of esoteric source material and oddities, including but not limited to personal photographs, found illustrations, Victorian ephemera, pornography, wrestling and and football footage, 18th century English portraiture, Tobey jugs and nursery figurines.  This ambiguously nostalgic material re-emerges in the completed works, ‘mechanically stripped from some unknown elsewhere’, as the artist Jake Chapman has put it, ‘without gaining any better purchase on their ontological ground’. In the finished works, this material toxicity cohabits with a startling delicacy to suggest both nursery-rhyme and nightmare. 
 
Other works include dreamlike illustrations adapted from fin- de-siècle children’s literature, depicting somnambulist figures that glide through an ambiguous rural realm as well as more abstract work: colourful representations of bodily forms, stocked with uneasy eroticism and produced using home-made carbon paper as a tool of abstraction.  The result is an unnerving world of nuance and suggestion that is profoundly individual, yet full of doors and windows left ajar to admit a curious eye. 

 
Solo exhibitions include Rural Scenes, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2022); Tender Meat (OVR), Nathalie Karg, New York, USA (2021), English Filth, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2020); JW Dunne & Other Stories, Brocket Gallery, London, UK (2018); A Thousand Plateaus, Brocket Gallery, London, UK (2016). Group exhibitions include Overspill, Terrace Gallery, London (2022); Artissima Unplugged, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa, Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art Italy (GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2020); Artissima, Torino, Italy (2020); The Flesh of Thought, Blyth Gallery, London UK (2019); Draw Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London UK (2019); Through The Looking Glass, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2018); Members Show, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, UK (2018); Drawing Now, Carreau du Temple, Paris, France (2018); Cartography, House of Fairytales, Cloud Cuckoo Land, London, UK (2018).
 
Roissetter was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing prize in 2013 awarded the Augustus Martyn Print Prize and the Sketch Prize, both in 2011.
 
EDUCATION
2011 MA Visual Communication, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2007 BA (Hons) Illustration, Camberwell College of Arts, London, UK
2003 BA  Foundation in Art & Design, Kingston University, London, UK
 
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2022  Rural Scenes, Cob Gallery, London, UK 
2020  English Filth, Cob Gallery, London, UK
2021 Tender Meat OVR, Nathalie Karg, NY, USA
2018 JW Dunne & Other Stories, Brocket Gallery, London, UK
2016 A Thousand Plateaus, Brocket Gallery, London, UK
 
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2022 Overspill, Terrace Gallery, London, UK
2020-21 Artissima Unplugged, GAM, Galleria Civica d'Arts Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, Turin Italy (Curated by Ilaria Bonacossa)
2020 Artissima Art Fair, Cat Roissetter + Tahmina Neghmat, Online
2019 The Flesh of Thought, Blyth Gallery, London, UK
2019 Draw Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
2018 Through The Looking Glass, Cob Gallery, London, UK
2018 Members Show, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, UK
2018 Drawing Now, Carreau du Temple, Paris, France
2018 Cartography, House of Fairytales, Cloud Cuckoo Land, London, UK
2018 Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, Royal Arsenal Riverside, London, UK
2017 AXIS: LONDRES MILANO, Tracce di Vapore, Milan, Italy
2017 Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, Royal Arsenal Riverside, London, UK
2017 Drawing Now, Carreau du Temple, Paris, France
2016 Selected Works, The Library, London, UK
2014 Works on Paper, Lucy Bell Gallery, Hastings, UK
2014 Rounds Drawings, The Vaults, London, UK
2014 Drawings & Etchings, The Union Club, London, UK
2014 NOOWYLSSES, House of St Barnabas, London, UK
2014 The Memorial Gallery, Hastings, UK
2014 Hide & Seek, Director’s Cut, London, UK
2013 Jerwood Drawing Prize, Jerwood Gallery, London, UK
2012 Sutton House, Sutton House, London, UK
2012 House of Fairy Tales, Bexley House, Kent, UK
2012 Open West, Gloucester Cathedral, Gloucester, UK
2012 Widely Absurd, Hundred Years Gallery, London, UK
2011 The Somnambulist, Space Gallery, Folkestone Triennial, UK
2011 SHOW 2011, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2011 Sketch Prize, Rabley Drawing Centre, Marlborough, UK
2010 Welcome to Happy, To & For Gallery, London, UK
2010 Oberon Book Awards, Gulbenkian Galleries, London, UK
2010 Visual Editor, Hockney Gallery, RCA, London, UK
2009 Telling Tales, Mayfair Library, London, UK
2009 The Foundry, London, UK
2007 La Viande, London, UK
2007 Live Draw, Corsica Studios, London, UK
 
AWARDS
2017 Dekkle Printmaking Prize (winner)
2013 Jerwood Drawing Prize (shortlisted)
2011 Augustus Martyn Print Prize (winner)
2011 Shortlisted selected for National Theatre’s Website for “Frankenstein”
2011 Sketch Prize (winner)
2011 Rabley Drawing Centre
2007 Longlist: V&A Illustration Awards