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Based primarily in Montreal and Flesherton, Ontario, Carmichael's multidisciplinary practice spanned five decades. She arrived in Canada from Scotland with her parents in 1955 and was raised on Vancouver Island and later Ottawa. In 1968, at 16, she ran away (by train...) to Vancouver and became influenced by the American dancer and choreographer, Isadora Duncan. She also studied with contemporary dancer Elizabeth Langley as a teenager which became a lifelong relationship and significantly influenced Carmichael's understanding of the form. After studying at Emily Carr in Vancouver and OCAD she began in 1979 to focus on performance, stemming from her interest in contemporary dance. In these works she explored themes of the body, movement, and human presence. To make ends meet Carmichael worked as a dancer in nightclubs throughout the 1970s and 80s and approached her gigs with a critical (and bemused) eye on the possibilities of movement in non-art settings. She said that "performance is like building sculpture, only instead of it being an object it's happening within a specific time frame." Also in 1979 she co-founded the noise band Niagara with her partner, artist Harold Klunder and painters Brian Burnett, Rae Johnson, Peter Templeman and Lorne Wagman, focusing on improvised sound and performance. The band's name came from Niagara Street in Toronto where the artists lived at the time, and their desire to invoke the power of Niagara Falls.
Carmichael moved into sculpture in the mid-1980s with works that were intuitive and additive, evoking growth and transformation with raw, austere materials like wood, cement, plaster, and papier-mâché. Often diaristic and reflecting the artist's perpetual wonder at the basic fact of being, Carmichael's drawings, paintings and watercolours can be densely active, text-based or elegantly spare and open. Everyday existence, internal dialogue, the cycle of life and decay, yearnings, doubt, exuberance, the messy vagaries and conflicting pulls of contemporary life all shine through. Like many artists, Carmichael held the authenticity of artwork made by children in high regard. She studied Early Childhood Education and was a visiting artist in many elementary schools to foster and support children's art-making. Their enthusiasm and unfiltered wonder was inspiration for her own practice for much of her life.
In 2020 CRG mounted a survey exhibition, "Catherine Carmichael: Sculptures, Paintings and Works on Paper" that was very well received. Associations were made with the work of Maria Lassnig, the expressive sculpture of AR Penck, of Louise Bourgeois and Marlene Dumas, the earth/body works of Ana Mendieta and the restrained drawings of Silvia Bachlii. Carmichael exhibited regularly since 1977 including Mercer Union, the Tom Thomson Gallery, Gallery Moos, Parisian Laundry and the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador among others. Gary Michael Dault, reviewing a Carmichael show of drawings for the Globe and Mail, lauded their emotional depth and vulnerability as a "skin of flexing thought."
Carmichael moved into sculpture in the mid-1980s with works that were intuitive and additive, evoking growth and transformation with raw, austere materials like wood, cement, plaster, and papier-mâché. Often diaristic and reflecting the artist's perpetual wonder at the basic fact of being, Carmichael's drawings, paintings and watercolours can be densely active, text-based or elegantly spare and open. Everyday existence, internal dialogue, the cycle of life and decay, yearnings, doubt, exuberance, the messy vagaries and conflicting pulls of contemporary life all shine through. Like many artists, Carmichael held the authenticity of artwork made by children in high regard. She studied Early Childhood Education and was a visiting artist in many elementary schools to foster and support children's art-making. Their enthusiasm and unfiltered wonder was inspiration for her own practice for much of her life.
In 2020 CRG mounted a survey exhibition, "Catherine Carmichael: Sculptures, Paintings and Works on Paper" that was very well received. Associations were made with the work of Maria Lassnig, the expressive sculpture of AR Penck, of Louise Bourgeois and Marlene Dumas, the earth/body works of Ana Mendieta and the restrained drawings of Silvia Bachlii. Carmichael exhibited regularly since 1977 including Mercer Union, the Tom Thomson Gallery, Gallery Moos, Parisian Laundry and the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador among others. Gary Michael Dault, reviewing a Carmichael show of drawings for the Globe and Mail, lauded their emotional depth and vulnerability as a "skin of flexing thought."
