Portrait of Catherine McCormick
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Catherine McCormick

Ceramic, Photography, Visual / Media

About the Artist

Catherine A. McCormick, Ph.D. is an award-winning photographer, clay artist and educator. She discovered clay during her community college years and continued with clay as a studio potter, educator, and entrepreneur in Harrisburg (Third Street Pottery) and Pittsburgh (Penn Avenue Pottery). She expanded her artistic style with photography during her continued undergraduate study at Penn State Harrisburg. After earning an M.A. in 2004, she began a career as a college educator teaching photography and other Communications courses. She continued her education and earned a doctorate in American Studies in 2020. McCormick retired from Penn State Harrisburg in 2021 and is actively producing and showing her art throughout the region and working as an independent scholar and educator in Smithsburg, Maryland.

Featured Work

Photos

This image is an alternative photographic print produced with the Van Dyke Brown process on watercolor paper. The liquid, light-sensitive emulsion is brushed onto the prepared paper and exposed to UV light with a one-to-one sized photographic negative in direct contact with the paper. The negatives are produced either with a large-format film camera or using digitally inverted images on transparencies. Rather than minimize the process, I seek to accentuate the brushing of the emulsion to provide a gestural, almost accidental feel to the final image. In this way, the image appears to have simply “happened,” and been weathered over time and discovered in a basement or attic after being stored improperly. The Van Dyke Brown emulsion gives the images a soft, brown to black tone.
This teapot set is slab constructed of stoneware clay. The red clay under the blue-green glaze gives the pieces the look of patinated copper. The set is small . . . the cups are espresso-sized.