Growing up in a suburb of LA, Cat’s father, a mechanical engineer, taught her the joys of problem-solving while her mother taught her to sew, life skills that have served her well for many years. She attended graduate school at Alfred University, NY where she received an MFA in Ceramics in 1985. After returning to California, she formed a business partnership with fellow artist, Chris Brown, and together they built a live/work space in the industrial section of Berkeley, the first of its kind in the city.

Cat lived there for the next twenty-five years, surrounded by the rumble of freight trains and by the clank and hum of ink factories, steel foundries, and machine shops. Besides running her own upholstery business, she worked with an agent creating dozens of large scale ceramic commissions for The Spectrum Restaurant Group, Kaiser Hospitals, and private homes. Later, wanting to explore a more personal direction in her art and influenced by the blue collar world in which she lived, she began constructing sculptures from everyday objects–repurposed shovels, discarded work gloves, organza overlays, and woven extension cords. She was a featured artist at the Stephan Wirtz gallery and included in group shows in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York.

In 1997, The New Yorker magazine published a full-page photo of Cat’s found glove sculpture, Bad Boys, a piece she had exhibited earlier that year in a group show at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. The show titled Murder included artists such as Sue Coe; Leon Golub; Mike Kelly; Yoko Ono; and Andy Warhol.