Panel Discussion: Dread Running

Catherine Smith’s series, Dread Running: Memorial to Lost Dogs, investigates humanity’s relationship to the animal world, establishes a place to mourn and pay tribute to countless unnamed shelter dogs. In a complicated act of grieving and honoring their lives, she combined the discarded cremains of dogs with ceramic glaze to create a set of relief sculptures. When compiled into a stop-motion video, these reliefs evoke the past lives of these creatures and the eternity in which they now run.

The artist will be joined by veterinarian and author Dr. Karen Fine, and Kristin Mullins, Executive Director of the Worcester Animal Rescue League, in a conversation about the artwork, its connections to their work in animal clinics, shelters, and with pet owners, and hard truths about humanity's relationship to animals. The discussion will be followed by a Q&A and a visit to the galleries together.

The galleries open that day at 9:15 AM, and the panel begins at 10:00 AM.

Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Catherine Smith, born in Washington, D.C. in 1950, grew up exposed to national news on a daily basis and abundant free art museums from an early age, leading to an interest in both politics and art. She pursued an art degree in painting, which unfortunately led to office work in printing companies that afforded little creative outlet. At age 35, she changed direction and moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually receiving an MFA in sculpture, preferring the physicality of working in three dimensions. Her love of installation work and embrace of the idea that art can relate to wider social and political issues led to solo, group and collaborative exhibitions in numerous museums and galleries over more than thirty years. She spent twenty years teaching sculpture, drawing and design at a college in Flint, Michigan. After retiring, she moved to Worcester and has maintained a studio there for the last ten years.

Karen Fine, D.V.M. is a veterinarian and writer who operated a house call practice in central Massachusetts for 25 years. Her memoir, The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life and Mortality is forthcoming in March 2023 from Penguin Random House. She is also the author of the textbook Narrative Medicine in Veterinary Practice from CRC Press, published in 2021. Dr. Fine, a Tufts graduate, currently practices at Central Animal Hospital in Leominster and Riverlin Animal Hospital in Millbury.

In 2019, after serving as a volunteer and a board member, Kristin Mullins became Executive Director of the Worcester Animal Rescue League, where she oversees their services, advocacy, and outreach. To this role, she brought decades of experience in human resources and operations at UMass Chan Medical School, and a life-long commitment to animal welfare, both here in Massachusetts and in the Virgin Islands. Ms. Mullins has served as an advisor to the New England Federation of Humane Societies and received the Community Leadership Award from the Northeast Human Resources Association for her volunteer work.

ABOUT CATHERINE SMITH: DREAD RUNNING

Dread Running, the winner of ArtsWorcester’s Present Tense Prize, will be on view in ArtsWorcester's East Gallery, and on the organization's website, from Thursday, November 10, through Sunday, December 18, 2022. Public gallery hours run Thursdays through Sundays, 12:00-5:00 PM.

As part of a series on mourning and physical loss, Smith retrieved discarded animal cremains from a Michigan shelter, near where she lived at the time. After combining them with ceramic glaze, she shaped them into forty-four relief sculptures that depict a running dog. The sculptures invoke Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century motion-study photographs of an English mastiff, "Dread," which shaped our understanding of how dogs move. Smith then photographed her sculptures, and turned those photographs into a stop-motion video in which the dog runs again, forever.

At a moment in which we are obliged to reconsider our cultural and biological dominance over the non-human world, Dread Running asks us to look at painful truths about our relationship to animal life and death, and the end to many of those relationships. “Like Victorian hair wreaths, the individual pieces are relics of lost lives,” says Smith. “When combined, they form a memorial to honor these animals—some old, some newly born, some unwanted and some lost, but once loved ferociously.”