Catherine Long

Catherine Long’s painting practice is grounded in a background in contemporary dance, where somatic awareness, spatial intelligence, and improvisation formed the basis of her formal  training. Rather than approaching painting as a departure from movement, Long treats the canvas as a choreographic field: an arena activated through the body, rhythm, and gesture. Her work draws on a sustained engagement with postwar experimental practices across dance, music, and visual art, where process and embodied perception take precedence over representation.

Working primarily at scale, Long builds her paintings through accumulation, and organises the surface through sinuous contours and layered marks that persist across time. The resulting compositions resist narrative resolution, instead inviting a direct, physiological encounter – one in which sensation precedes interpretation and viewing becomes an embodied experience.

Long holds an MA in Dance from De Montfort University (2010) and a PhD in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (2017). She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024. Her work has been supported by residencies in the United Kingdom and Portugal, and she is a recipient of funding from Arts Council England. In 2025, Long presented a series of large-scale paintings at Lucent W1, London, in collaboration with Wilder Gallery, and participated in group exhibitions including LBF@TheLake II at LBF Contemporary, Muskoka, and Sight Lines at Hurst Contemporary, London. Long lives and works in London.

Image credit: brave Projects, Sarah Larby