Magic Muse
by Catherine Gomersall
They told you the problem was your attitude. Your persistence was aggression. Your vision, unrealistic. Your refusal to compromise, arrogance. Magic Muse is written for everyone who has heard that and kept going anyway.
Drawing on a decade of art-making without institutional permission, Dr Catherine Gomersall traces her creative practice through nine major projects — from Tinder Machina, a satire of automated intimacy, to Survivor Personae, a collaboration exploring the fractured self of trauma recovery, to Selfie Studio, an AI-guided self-portraiture project that turns the lens toward collective possibility. Together, these works map a journey through digital experimentation, pandemic survival, identity erasure, and the current AI revolution — each project building on the last, none of them waiting for anyone's approval.
But this is not a book about celebrating endurance. Magic Muse makes a harder argument: resilience is not justice, and the two should never be confused. When we conflate them, we ask the excluded to be grateful for the strength their exclusion gave them. We turn survival into virtue and let broken systems off the hook.
Gomersall refuses that bargain. With dry intelligence and hard-won clarity, she examines how the "resilience" demanded of marginalised artists so often functions as another word for accepting what should never have to be accepted — and how creative practice can become, instead, a site of reclamation, sovereignty, and refusal.
Magic Muse is for the artist who has been pushed out of spaces that claimed to support art. For the creative whose layered identity doesn't fit the official record. For anyone who has ever asked not "What's wrong with me?" but "What's wrong with these systems?" — and kept making work anyway.
What readers are saying
“Catherine is simply brilliant in all she does!”
— Kath Harding
“Connective, reflective, shy, loud, funny and thoughtful Catherine Gomersall's art is playful and personal and yet still challenging and deliberately irksome! I love how she takes from current social imagery and creates hyper-real versions that takes her art both too far and to just right...”
— Brian Cavanagh
“Magic Muse is an immersive and thoughtful journey into Catherine’s deep commitment to living authentically. It speaks to the courage required to truly accept yourself and your life's experiences, and to conscious actions to design a life that reflects who you are, rather than who you are expected to be. What makes this book especially beautiful is Catherine’s ability to balance self-awareness with presence in the modern world. She embraces the pace of social and technological change, she's a thorough technophile and shows how it’s possible to stay grounded, creative, and true to yourself while navigating the creative possibilities that technology can bring.”
— Gina Kasmas
“The art has me mystified and intrigued, the visual content catches every emotion and visual element..absolutely amazing work 🙌”
— Lisa Hughes
“Catherine your work is provocative and amazing. More current and more interesting than Cindy Sherman.Put your best foot forward and go for it!”
— Seamus Murphy
“She’s an incredibly talented artist with a unique style. You can really see the attention to detail and creativity in her work. I’ve seen her work develop over time and it’s honestly impressive. Her art has a really distinctive style and a lot of thought behind it. You can tell she genuinely cares about her work.”
— Vick Gohil
“Passionate, considered and uncompromising in focus. Catherine’s practice and her projects are always worth investigating.”
— Neil Hargreaves
“I've been following Catherine Gomersall 's artistic expressions for a number of years and I'm so happy that she has created this book which brings different aspects together. A fascinating book about an intriguing life. Brava!”
— Peter Jones
More books by Catherine Gomersall
Tinder Lucida
An artist's memoir
In 2016, Catherine Gomersall began making fictionalised Tinder profiles as a joke for her friends on Facebook. What started as deadpan comedy about online dating and performed identity took a darker turn when a protracted sexual assault changed the nature of the project entirely.
Tinder Lucida is the conclusion of The Tinder Project — a multi-year social media performance that used the Tinder interface to interrogate how identity is constructed, policed, and weaponised in digital spaces. This book documents the exhibition held at TAP Gallery, Sydney in 2019, and includes a candid conversation between Gomersall and curator Kit Ball about the project's evolution: from humour to trauma, from Facebook to gallery wall, from self-portraiture to punk defacement.
Gomersall's work asks what it means to present yourself authentically in spaces designed to reduce you to a profile. It asks why irony becomes illegible when a woman refuses to be legible. And it asks what happens when persistence gets reframed as provocation.
Part artist's book, part cultural document, Tinder Lucida is an unflinching record of making difficult work in difficult circumstances — and refusing to stop.