I’m interested in how materials hold memory—how pressure, repetition, and touch leave a residue that can be felt long after the action itself has passed.

—Catherine MacMahon

Catherine MacMahon (b. 1989) is an American multidisciplinary artist best known for her sculptural installations, drawings, and mixed-media works that explore memory, repetition, material transformation, and the body’s resonance in everyday labor. Working across steel, enamel, leather, and found materials, MacMahon’s practice is deeply rooted in the physicality of making where gesture, surface, and temporal accumulation become carriers of meaning. Her work engages the tension between structural rigor and poetic fracture, anchoring abstract form in visceral, lived experience.

Trained in architecture and fine art, MacMahon draws from historical craft, embodied labor, and tactile process, inviting viewers to consider how material marks encode personal and collective histories. Her installations and objects often confront the body’s labor — both its burden and its tenderness — rendering materials that are at once resilient and vulnerable.

MacMahon’s work has been featured in exhibitions that challenge conventional gallery structures and expectations, and she continues to engage in dialogues that cross disciplines and contexts. She lives and works in Dallas, where her practice maintains a sustained inquiry into how making, and the labor it entails, is inseparable from perception, memory, and meaning.