Portfolio
Thank you for your interest in my work, and for taking time to review a portfolio of my latest work - a series of mixed media abstract landscapes called, “Topophilia”.
Mixed media Abstract Landscapes by Cath Duncan
The term topophilia - first used by poet W. H. Auden and later popularised by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan - describes the way that our love for a particular landscape shapes our memories, identity, culture, and sense of belonging. This series of mixed media abstract landscape works explores how we create and re-create our inner landscapes and sense of belonging - to each other, to the earth, and to ourselves - after loss.
Working with collage, recycled materials, and acrylic paint, belonging is presented as a living process - a recurring cycle of coming apart and putting the pieces back together again in new ways. Mirroring the artist’s creative process, Topophilia offers a dialogue between visual art, poetry, and reflection, encouraging viewers to consider how nature teaches us to thrive in diversity and to heal across boundaries.
Current Exhibition
TOPOPHILIA: Landscapes of Belonging is currently on show at Museum Hoge Woerd in Utrecht from 16 January until 5 April 2026.
The exhibition includes 16 artworks between 30 x 30cm and 150 x 120cm in size.
Materials
The artworks in this series were created using recycled painted packaging papers, acrylic paint, and collage on canvas and wood panels. Materials that once protected, cleaned, or wrapped the materials, tools, and surfaces in the artist’s studio are transformed into new visual landscapes. By painting, tearing, layering, and reassembling these papers, the work enacts a process of regeneration - an affirmation that beauty can be created out of what has been torn apart, that purpose and meaning can be transformed, and that personal, social, and ecological renewal are always possible.
Visual Language
Colour is the first language communicating the emotional narratives of the artworks. Terracotta hues speak of earth, ancestry, and grounding - the histories and places that hold us. Blues evoke sky and water, shared air, expansiveness, possibility, and hope. Together they express the tension and harmony between rootedness and openness - both important ways of being for the creation of belonging.
Vertical lines and hard edges suggest the literal and figurative, real and imagined boundaries that shape our lives: political borders, social identities, physical limits, and rigid ways of thinking. Where colours and textures bleed and overlap, the works open into moments of connection, renewal, and the possibility of rebuilding across borders.
Rich, tactile surfaces form an essential element of the visual language. These textures emerge through spontaneous and unconscious layers of paint built up on recycled packaging materials. The warm brown of the underlying paper is a unifying presence - visible in the gaps between painted forms, emerging through thin glazes, and revealed where the paper has been torn or folded. These traces of earlier lives and processes remain part of the finished works, holding the history of their making and reinforcing the series’ themes of repair, transformation, and renewal.
A selection of the artworks
What the Falling Leave Whisper Back (2025). Recycled painted paper and acrylic on wood panel. 90×80cm.
This abstract landscape captures the shimmer of autumn trees mirrored in still water - a moment of quiet release and radiant colour. This poem written in response by Cath’s friend, Beth Baugh, captures the artwork’s spirit of gentle surrender:
There is joy / In letting go, / In flying into / The unknown / With abandon, / Seeing / How the sunlight / Illuminates our friends / And finally realizing / We shine as brightly.
The artwork invites viewers into that same recognition: the beauty in release, the glow in one another, and the light we carry within ourselves.
Now Hemmed In, Now Grasping All (2025). Recycled painted paper and acrylic on canvas. 100×120cm.
This watery abstract landscape reflects the movement between the grief of loss and the grace of renewal described in Rilke’s poem, Evening. Vertical divisions evoke borders between nations and selves, while soft gradients open toward moments of connection and transcendence. Like the poem, the work expresses the delicate balance of being human: shaped by limits, yet continually reaching toward connection and new beginnings.
Mount the Hidden Tide and Travel Back Home (2025). Recycled painted paper on canvas. 150×120cm.
Inspired by Hafiz’s poem, All the Hemispheres, this abstract seascape is about an inner journey. Boat-like forms drift across a shoreline toward the glow of a sun, moon, or the poem’s “Great Circle inside of You” rising on the horizon. Rich reds and pinks in chamber-like shapes evoke the feeling of being inside a living heart. The work speaks to the quiet courage of traveling beyond what is familiar, and the deeper voyage of finding your way back home to yourself - the birthplace of all belonging.
The Sky Was (2025). Recycled painted paper and acrylic on canvas. 80 × 70 cm
This work began in pure delight - an immersion in the colours, textures, and vastness of the sky. I wanted the sky and land to feel integrated rather than separate or hierarchical, because in truth they belong to one another, despite the divisions we often impose in our minds. The process was playful and sensory, guided by the simple joy of exploring colour, shape, and movement. The resulting artwork feels open and cheerful, peaceful yet alive. When I later read E.E Cummings’ poem, The Sky Was, it felt as though we had been looking at the very same sky.
As the Sun Moves Through the Sky (2025). Acrylic on canvas. 70×80cm.
In the foreground, sky appears where land might be expected, suggesting the deep interconnectedness between the two. Like so much in life that we speak of as separate - people from one another, or humans from nature - sky and land are, in truth, continuous. Air moves not only above us but through soil, water, and every living being, entering our bodies with each breath. This painting reflects that shared, porous world: one atmosphere, one ecology, one belonging.
Flourishing Graft (2025). Recycled painted paper on canvas. 100×100cm.
Flourishing Graft depicts a grafted fruit tree bearing both lemons and oranges - a vision of harmony through difference. Its overlapping circles represent fruit, family, and the relational worlds that make up our societies and sense of belonging. In an age of ecological and social fragmentation, Flourishing Graft offers a hopeful metaphor for resilience: that flourishing is possible through diversity and interdependence.
About Cath Duncan
Cath Duncan is a contemporary artist based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Working primarily with acrylic paints, mixed media, and collage, her practice explores how we remain connected to pleasure, play, and hope in the midst of loss and fear.
Duncan’s first career in grief support therapy and her training in narrative inquiry continue to shape the way she understands both life and art. She approaches experience as something continually created and re- created through small acts of meaning-making and creativity - a process that mirrors her layered, evolving, intuitive creative process.
In her studio, as in therapeutic conversations, the meaning of an artwork is not known in advance but gradually emerges through cycles of doing and reflecting. Poetry forms an important companion in this process, helping her to articulate what the works seem to be reaching toward.
The themes in her work are informed by her own lived experiences of re-building her own inner landscapes after significant change and loss. Her own stories of immigration, chronic illness, disability, transracial adoption, and organ transplantation have deepened her interest in how our relationships with each other, with nature, and with ourselves are continually formed and re-formed. Drawing inspiration from poetry as well as the colours, textures, and metaphors of resilience that she finds in the natural world, Duncan’s practice invites reflection on interdependence, repair, and the possibility of renewal.
Duncan has exhibited in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, and her work is held in private collections in the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, South Africa, and Namibia.
Exhibitions
2027 - (Forthcoming) Exhibition, Galerie Onder de Linde, Tholen, NL
2026 - (Forthcoming) Exhibiting artist at Kunstkijk, Goeree-Overflakkee, NL
2026 - Mijn Plek in ons Stadsie Group Exhibition, Volksbuurt Museum, Utrecht, NL
2026 - Topophilia: Landscapes of Belonging Solo Exhibition, Museum Hoge Woerd, Utrecht, NL
2025 - “Vleuten Masters” Music and Art Group Exhibition, Utrecht, NL
2025 - Atelier Route Utrecht, Kunstliefde, NL
2025 - Duo exhibition - Theehuis Rhijnauwen, Utrecht, NL
2025 - 100 x 100 Group Exhibition, Bobcat Gallery, London UK
2025 - Encountering Nature Group Exhibition, Fox Yard Studio Gallery, Stowmarket, UK
2025 - Solo Exhibition, St Antonius Hospital, Utrecht, NL
2024 - Solo Exhibition, Picalilly Restaurant, Utrecht, NL
2024 - Solo Exhibition, De Schakel, Utrecht, NL
2024 - Group Exhibition, ZIMIHC Kunstroute, Utrecht, NL
2023 - Present Group Exhibition, Kunstliefde Gallery, Utrecht, NL
2023 - Atelier Route Utrecht, Kunstliefde, NL
2021 - Out of The Blue Group Exhibition, Bright Street Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2021 - Cornucopia Group Exhibition, South Hill Vineyards Gallery, Elgin ,South Africa
2021 - Abundance Group Exhibition, Bright Street Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2021 - Summer Colours Group Exhibition, Bright Street Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2020 - The Avenues Group Exhibition, Cape Town, South Africa
Education
I’ve developed as an artist through selected private courses and mentorships at Newlyn School of Art (UK),, The Peter Clarke Art Centre (South Africa),, David Mankin (UK),, Nicholas Wilton (USA),, Alice Sheridan (UK),, and Christine Beckley (South Africa).. My art practice is strengthened by a previous career in Grief Support Therapy, a Master's degree in Clinical Social Work (University of Calgary, Canada),, and training in Narrative Inquiry (Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy, Canada)
Thank you for your interest in my work
Thank you for taking time to review my portfolio. Please download and save a PDF copy for yourself.
If you’d like to view more of the artworks in myTopophilia collection, you can do that here.
You can also view commissions I’ve sold and other collections of my artwork here.
I look forward to hearing from you and discussing opportunities to work together.
Warm regards,
Cath Duncan
+31627977366
@cathd on Insta
