In 'The Rain' an old woman begins her story with the words “People used to give me all kinds of things.”  She tells of her past, when she was very young and would stand in a field as hundreds of people filed past her to the trains.

Forbidden to take anything with them, they handed her the small treasures they carry. She lists some of them - spectacles, shoes, hat pins, photographs, parcels tied up with string - and she takes them home and cares for them in the vain hope that they might one day return to reclaim them. One treasure in particular holds significance for her - a small phial of rainwater from the village of the young boy who left it with her.

 

Daniel Keene's collaboration with director Ariette Taylor—the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project—was critically acclaimed both locally and overseas and was first performed in Melbourne in the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project 1988

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In this body of paintings, 'The Rain’, Catherine Bainbridge has combined both images and words, encouraging the viewer to both see and feel at the same time. "Using the symbolic changes of shapes and voids, colours and textures, I see beyond the words and feel the brutal entrapment of the trains (#3), the disintegrating house, (#14), those people who walked along the well-worn tracks over the fields (#10 and #11) and finally the small boy and his precious collection of rain (#27 and #28).

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I hope viewers will take the time to read the script and look in, around and behind the words and in doing so, appreciate their own responses in formed words or unformed thoughts."

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- Catherine Bainbridge 2021