Oriana Catton

About

At the Border; Continuing to Be

Oriana Catton (b. 1995) is an emerging contemporary artist born and raised in Hong Kong and based in London. Catton’s current practice innovatively bridges the gap between fine art and applied art disciplines, poetically merging jewellery and performance art. Their interdisciplinary practice spans performance, jewellery, installation, moving image, sculpture, and sound. 

At the Border; Continuing to Be is a body of work that navigates the interplay of meaning between spatial, bodily, and geographical borders. Borders are embodied, stretched, crossed, broken… at times used to contain and exclude while at others, engaged to establish a sense of safety, protection, and resilience. Intersecting the personal and the political, their work combines expressive jewellery objects with performance to craft intimate yet confronting moments, questioning what it means to belong within the space of one’s own body and home. 

Rooted in feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, Catton’s practice utilises autoethnographic and embodied research methodologies to interrogate intersectional, layered narratives. Their personal experiences of migration, trauma, and queer identity are imbued into their work, resonating deeply with themselves and within contemporary discourse. Catton integrates a performative movement vocabulary with metalwork, silversmithing, and meticulous hand-processing techniques to explore these notions of belonging—within the body, nations, culture, gender and social constructs. Her work seeks to quietly hold the audience’s gaze and invoke compassion and solidarity in the viewer. 

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1. Stretched
A 24ct gold vulva, formed and methodically polished by hand, is carefully pried and stretched open into a necklace and adorned. Considering the vaginal orifice as an intimate border, the work exposes the vulva as a frame crossed by external bodies—in pleasure, violence, and birth. The performance permanently alters its shape, using the properties of annealed metal to contemplate both material and emotional elasticity, physical and psychological resilience.

2. Flesh Cube
“Flesh Cube” is a performance examining layers of social and gender conformity, boundary crossing, and the tensions of inhabiting a space or body that does not fit. Nylon stockings are hand-sewn to a steel frame to form a wearable space within which the body is contained—a second skin which simultaneously conceals and reveals, restricts and expands. A soundscape overlaying poetic, inner reflections with field recordings of echoed halls and clamouring doors fills the space of the room, while the artist’s body fills the cube.

3. Marking Territory: my bed, ’97
97 unique rabbit droppings are cast directly into bronze and strung together to create a single, 6 metre-long chain. Throughout the performance the chain is worn on the body, spread onto the floor as a demarcation of territorial lines, and hung onto art museum stanchions outlining a child’s bed. A soundscape superimposes recent field recordings from my childhood room with sounds from the Hong Kong transit system and archival recordings from the 1997 handover.

4. Residual Discharge
“Residual Discharge no. 1” and “Residual Discharge no. 2” exist equally as documentation of process, and as poetic works on canvas examining bodily, material traces, and object-aggressor dynamics. The work embodies the process of abrasion, critiquing the relationship between the emery as a violent agent acting against the surface, and the silver vulva operating as the passive object. Residue from both object and aggressor become imperceptibly mixed and memorialised in the tape.