Catriona Faulkner is collector, stitcher and creator of intricate images of celebration, beauty and history.

Catriona began collecting as a child, her school desk and shelves obsessively filled with treasures. She continues to collect; magpie-like she gathers shiny screws, nails, nibs and haberdashery, toy soldiers, tiny skulls and bones. These mundane objects, broken, obsolete and discarded are given new life, assembled with hand stitching and embellished with goldwork and beading into visual curiosities with a different story to tell.

She draws inspiration from diverse sources; religious ceremony and reliquary, military regalia and Mexican culture, common to all is their propensity to showy display to relate their message. The intricacies of surgery, prosthetics and medical technologies are also concerns within her work after an accident left Catriona with a chronic pain condition and medically implanted bionics. She is fascinated too by people’s relationships with possessions and the human desire to memorialise.

Multiple influences lead Catriona to challenge how we observe familiar objects and to  encourage their re-examination in the new order and shape she has given them.

Catriona explains her practice as,”it's where I make sense of myself”.