Cat Rigdon: The Carillon Dig-Site

In 2022/2023, Cat Rigdon scoured the Tarrant County College – South campus to learn more about the landscape in which she was to spend the next year as a resident artist.  She climbed through catwalks, picked apart manicured grass, and investigated forgotten corners of her new studio home. During her residency, she also unpacked her own history finding trace remnants of the last time she had a living home, which had been neatly placed into a 5 x 5 ft climate controlled unit in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff.

Home or the lack of home has been a persistent theme in Rigdon’s life since her family’s sudden exodus from her childhood home of Cyprus. Since then, home has often been a vision of a bygone era or coexisting with a romantic partner. In 2020, Rigdon transitioned from her stationary home in Dallas with her then partner, to living in a suitcase and flying between Dallas and London every few months. She has had no home, except for studio spaces and a storage unit.

During one of Rigdon’s trips to London, she visited the ancient Cypriot section of The British Museum. The wealth of familiar visual cues at the museum sparked Rigdon’s curiosity to explore the history of archeology in Cyprus and how it corresponds to her desire and fear of home. The prints, drawings, and hand-built ceramics within The Carillon Dig-Site draw inspiration from ancient Mediterranean geometric pottery and from Rigdon’s time as a student within a traditional Cypriot pottery.

In the Fall of 2022, Cat Rigdon entered her artist residency with TCC and was beginning courtship with a man who had previously denied romantic feelings for her. The warmth and insecurities of this new relationship is charted through her work with miniscule notes and drawings in the handbuilt ceramics left in the pit and the corresponding drawings on the gallery walls. She invites the viewer to be invasive and investigate the objects which reflect the vulnerable, embarrassing, and tender moments of Rigdon’s life. “