About Catherine Drea

 

Catherine Drea is a visual artist, writer and blogger who lives and works in rural County Waterford. Catherine writes a column called As I See It for the Waterford News & Star and her first book Solace-life, loss and the healing power of nature, was published in the Autumn of 2022 by The O’Brien Press. It is available now in all good bookshops. Local readers can find signed copies in the Mount Congreve Garden Shop.

A graduate of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) and University College Cork (UCC), she has worked as a graphic designer, an art teacher and a group facilitator. After 10 years of part time teaching and raising three boys, she trained as an Integrative Psychotherapist, completed a Masters and co-founded Framework-building ethical leadership and practice with Glynis Currie. Over the years, Framework developed creative methodologies, inclusive facilitation, training and set up and supported community and equality based projects in Ireland.

In 2010, after the economic crisis, Catherine and the Framework team began working from home. Daily walks, camera in hand spurred her on to start her blog Foxglove Lane, musing about solitude, life and creativity. Catherine has since won four Irish Blog Awards, including Best Photography Blog in 2018 and a Silver Award in the Open House/Architectural Journal Competition, London. In 2017 she left Framework to pursue her own work. Her exhibition with Kate Quinn, From seed to blossom, from blossom to fruit was part of Waterford Imagine Festival that year.

A lifelong activist, Catherine has been a campaigner in a number of social movements over the years. She remains a passionate advocate of equality, biodiversity and the healing power of creativity. She shares a couple of wild acres with her Right Hand Man and has three grown up sons and a grand daughter. 

 

 

 

“On a rainy Sunday in 2011 I began to blog. I called it Foxglove Lane after the spectacular wild flowers that bloom here every summer. I began anonymously and temporarily, until eventually about a year later I put my name to it. I’m still here!

Blogging was literally a continuation of what I had been doing since I was tiny. Filling copybooks with poems, collecting rose petals and snails in the hedgerows, scratching pictures on the wall above my bed. It combines many of the things I like to play with. It feels like freedom. There is no other agenda.

I got my first pocket camera at the age of 10 and turned to making portraits of the family, the kids and animals I knew. Every roll of 12 black and white shots, was eked out over weeks until they were sent away to be printed as tiny, 2 inch square images. I’ve taken photographs ever since, snared by the alchemy. Photography is rich with creative possibilities.

While nothing much seems to happen down this long boreen, at some level absolutely everything happens! Observation through the camera lens opens up possibilities to see more deeply. How light reveals the mood of the day, how the smallest beings live and where, how trees shelter each other and the land. Photography captures fleeting moments in time, even as they pass into memory.

The rhythms of nature keep my feet on the ground but I also struggle with the unfathomable beauty of this planet and how close we are to the loss of it. Everyday I witness some small death, another piece at the edge of extinction. It’s a high wire balancing act; one foot on this tranquil green island and one foot in the global chaos.”