Enderby/Grindrod, BC
She is a multidisciplinary artist, puppeteer, and community-based creator. Her work weaves together puppetry, folk traditions, site-specific theatrical ceremonies, and community art projects—bringing people into connection with one another and with the surrounding landscape. She creates in marketplaces, on streets, in nature, and in theatre halls.
As founding Artistic Director of Runaway Moon Theatre, Cathy has spent the past 25 years working in Enderby/Grindrod, on the traditional territory of the Secwépemc Splats’in First Nation. Through diverse theatre projects, she has explored human relationships to land, to the cyclical time of the natural world, and to waterways. She has performed and directed puppet theatre in Montreal, Vancouver, across the Okanagan at Caravan Farm Theatre, and internationally in Mexico and Kenya.
Trained as an ArtStarts Infusion Teaching Artist, she also leads the Popoleko Balkan Choir. In 2005, Cathy received the name T’uctwes te S’t’lcalqw (“Flying Spirit”) from the Kia7as (grandmothers) of the Splats’in First Nation, in recognition of her long-standing collaboration with Rosalind Williams, historian and revitalizer of Splats’in language and knowledge.
Cathy is the mother of three children who grew up alongside Runaway Moon Theatre. She lives on Curly Willow Farm, an ecological vegetable farm where she also hosts numerous theatre and community gatherings.
For the Ore Mountains exhibition, she contributed two works. One consists of figures of elderly mountain dwellers, recalling those who, in Rege Kienast’s story, hid in caves during the war. The other was created in collaboration with the Splats’in community and Secwépemc artist Tania Willard: a series of banners celebrating the salmon’s return to local rivers. Just as natural cycles are renewed in Enderby, this work carries a wish for the renewal of water cycles in the Ore Mountains after years of coal mining.