Catherine Payton's practice explores how the familiar and ordinary world can be transformed to incorporate and create unlikely and strange scenarios. Through constructed narrative, and its interplay with objects and sculptures, she invites viewers to suspend disbelief and invest in the implausible reality in front of them.

Catherine presented a new installation for New Work Scotland, focused around a new adapted screenplay - DESTINY | PILOT EPISODE. This new work had autobiographical starting point. A man (Martin Heald), unknown to Catherine's family, believed he was the reincarnation of her great uncle, the Second World War wireless operator, Richard Seymour.

The man was initially believed to be an imposter by Catherine's family, after he was set a series of questions by her grandfather. A few years later, an episode of the cult TV show Strange But True, captivated the public with a recreation of Richard's death as retold by this man, presenting his story as the truth. This unbelievable story was created into a book by Heald entitled DESTINY: ONE MAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH LIFE, DEATH AND REBIRTH. Catherine adapted the book into a screenplay, which forms the framework from which the sound-work, video and sculptures are drawn from.

Download the exhibition information here

Read the New Work Scotland 2010 publication, which includes New Writing Scotland essays by Laura Edbrook and Norman Hogg here

New Work Scotland Programme was an initiative launched by Collective in 2000. Through an open call, New Work Scotland Programme identified and supported some of the most promising new artists working in Scotland - providing them with the opportunity to create new work and bring it to the attention of a wider public. The 2010 participants were Jacob Kerray,
Catherine Payton, Nicolas Party and Shelly Nadashi.

New Writing Scotland grew out of New Work Scotland Programme and was initiated in 2004 in collaboration with Edinburgh College of Art's Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies, to promote creative writing about the visual arts coupled with targeted support to the exhibiting artists - providing them with them with their first artists text.