Estates of Tomorrow, by Catherine O’Donnell (2013)

Catherine O’Donnell is an Australian visual artist whose practice “is about the beauty of the uncelebrated and ordinary“, looking for the intrinsic culture, history, and complexity of the suburban environment.

She draws vernacular houses (mostly elevations) as an ordinary and everyday subject which is at once visible and invisible, in that is also recessed into our minds like wallpaper.

The buildings in her black and white drawings are usually devoid of the human presence and decontextualized in order to underpin geometry, spatial composition, and form of the commonplace, yet still suggesting people’s inhabitation by means of details such as open windows.

I use representation as a catalyst to ignite the imagination of the viewer and invite them to look beyond the mundane and banal. To revisit these spaces imaginatively and find the aesthetic poetry embedded within in the suburban landscape, while at the same time disrupting cultural prejudices which prevent people from seeing the underlying elegance of these simple buildings.

(From the artist’s own website).