Cathy Ward's impossibly detailed scratchboard drawings of mounds, waves, and curlicues of human hair conflate an historically informed 21st century art practice with a 19th century eccentricity into a seamless unified field of locks and tresses. Rooted in the fetishism of Victorian hair wreaths and the compulsive graphomania of the outsider draughtsperson, Ward's mythically and sexually charged graphic works burst forth from the rigid restraints of repressive Bouffantism in a torrential horror vacuii outpouring of mammalian energy that refers as much to high modernist all-over painting tropes as it does to the intricate linework of inadvertent feminist outsiders like Madge Gill or Laure Pigeon.

- Doug Harvey   2004