Catharine Cary trained as an economic diplomat, in her own words ‘selling German steam boilers to Asian sweatshops’, working on urban development and infant dehydration projects in Africa and leading the restoration of the New Amsterdam Theatre for Walt Disney at the southern edge of Times Square, before relocating to Paris in 1997 at the age of 36 to pursue a career in painting. Her work has been displayed at Art Basel Miami, Art Chicago and the Foire internationale d’art contemporain, and in 2011 her installation WHISPER described as ‘a dress of silk organza sewn with 80 envelopes filled with essential elegant ephemera’ was featured at the Venice Biennale, yet following the death of her partner she changed tack once again, taking dance improvisation classes and eventually establishing the What IIIF? improvisational festival plus a platform for instant composition in dance called Instant Pudding! with Marie Desoubeaux and Marguerite Papazoglou.
Her debut recording AIR CAKE and other summery occupations brings a dash of all these things to bear, as Cary sets a series of playfully surreal stories which she originally created spontaneously for her young nephew to the sputtering wheezes and other jazzy concoctions of the veteran MontrƩal players Ivan Bamford on drums and Eric Lewis on cornet and bass clarinet. Diving into their respective toy boxes, the result resonates across all ages even though it might be aimed at kids, as Cary with the impressionistic vigour of Katherine Mansfield or a sometimes Nabokovian languor and linguistic relish, or like A. A. Milne with a dollop of Haruki Murakami depicts a summertime vacation by a small French beach.
Her three young characters Leila, Grecian and Manu get up to all sorts on their holiday, thrown flat on their backs in fields full of daisies, weaving leaves while the other children are away at camp, giving lettuce green manicures to red squirrels with an imaginary friend named Clementine, or climbing the Larrun mountain at the western end of the Pyrenees which crosses the border between France and Spain, weighing the perils of island building in the Atlantic Ocean, and whipping delectable cakes out of sea foam, clouds and compressed air. Too pungent to be cloying and too briskly imaginative to pass as mere whimsy, moving always with a poised yet staggering sense of swing, AIR CAKE and other summery occupations perfectly encapsulates the idle fancy of childhood summers, that mix of balmy and somehow weighty indolence mixed with a boundless and time-warped sense of possibility like dandelion pappus wafting in the breeze, until Cary leaves us confections in hand with a conundrum about the flavour of the frosting.
