Catherine Pilgrim

Background Check (Temporal Layers Series), 2026
This installation continues an ongoing exploration of the layered nature of personal and cultural identity, shaped by lived cross-cultural experience—where memory, place, and history intersect and evolve.

At its core is an earlier image of a Silver Banksia, Silver not Gold, which functions as both anchor and provocation. The work suggests a reordering of values, inviting viewers to privilege the natural world over human extraction and destruction. It reflects on the enduring impact of colonial gold mining, which deeply scarred the landscape of Djaara Country, where I have lived for the past eighteen years.
In Background Check, I revisit and rework Silver not Gold, ‘remixing’ it with fabric, other botanical imagery, and abstract forms drawn from Malaysia - a place connected to my childhood and adolescence. These fragments bring together multiple geographies and temporalities, creating a dialogue between past and present, knowns and unknowns.

The title plays on the notion of a ‘background check’ as a validation of character, reframing it as an introspective process—an unveiling of personal history and cross-cultural experience. Identity here is not fixed or easily verified, but continuously unfolding through layers of memory, inheritance, and place.

The work embraces the complexity and nuance of identity, revealing its contradictions, shifts, and quiet, unresolved tensions.