In Oscillating Identity, Catalina Swinburn overlays a fragment of travertine
marble with a photographic print of her own woven textile works—
ritualistic acts of repetition and resilience. The surface evokes both
ancient grids and contemporary abstraction, blurring the boundary
between fabric and architecture.

Through stone and image, cloth and self, Oscillating Identity becomes a
poetic cartography of becoming—woven, fractured, and ultimately whole.
The grid-like surface in Oscillating Identity is composed from the artist’s
own woven collages made from pages of books. Swinburn’s practice often
transforms sacred or archival texts through performative folding and
weaving, turning instruments of historical authority into intimate acts of
reclamation. The woven surface is derived from these transformed texts.
Each thread-like line of the grid originates in a real act of weaving paper; a
physical engagement with language and history. The marble, once used to
build empires, becomes a stage for this re-authored material, suggesting a
quiet defiance of dominant structures and fixed identities.

A small photographic detail—a figure alone on a boat—reveals the artist
herself, navigating uncertain waters. This subtle intervention disrupts the
symmetry of the composition and introduces a personal, performative
presence within a seemingly formal structure. The artist’s inclusion of her
own image intensifies this dialogue. Her body becomes both witness and
vessel, moving across a surface etched with memory, silence, and
reclamation. The result is not just an artwork, but a palimpsest of
displacement and belonging, inscribed through gesture and page,
performance and stone.