[8] With a career that spanned for a total of five decades, her many works have been influenced by a great number of events, personal occurrences, and movements in each of the places she has visited throughout the years.
Following the Fluxus Movement's way of thinking, she created Imbunches, which was a collection of mixed media artworks on a display board.
In an interview with Zoya Kocur, Catalina Parra says that this experience was extremely rewarding: the children had a lot of hidden potential that she hoped to release into the world through their creation of art.
Each artwork features collage elements and includes a common mixed media style: thread, newspaper, magazine clippings, photos (either taken herself or from other sources), staples, and other various fabrics.
She takes what the media portrays as concrete constructs and manipulates them by means of juxtaposition in order to reveal their contradictions and fallacies when applied to everyday reality and history.
is a work that encompasses her personal expression of the Chilean government through her newspaper clipping showing General Augusto Pinochet and Hugo Banzer of Bolivia hugging.
The current event at the time (shown by the newspaper clipping) was the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet, former dictator of Chile, for a request issued by the government of Spain for the murder of Spanish citizens during his dictatorship.
Through ads and titles created by The New York Times, Parra's collage collection attempts to show the emotions of the general's supporters and opponents.
Her indirect views and art, as she had intended, gives the subliminal message to its viewers about the multiple topics she covers because she actually was at risk of being imprisoned upon proper interpretation of her antigovernment propaganda.
Although in Imbunches, the suturing is a part of the myth she recreated, Parra says the use of suture-looking thread appearing in the rest of her works represents disappearance, wounds, and being shut-out.
She says her collage is a combination of Cubism, Surrealism, and primarily Dadaism—she wants to use art as Dadaism does as a way of waking the viewers up to current/past events and allow them to see the truth of social responsibility.
Parra uses her influences from Dadaism and her own experiences to create the collages that she does: she will often take long walks and ponder nature around her to set herself in the correct mood for working.
In these works, Parra critically examines military interventions as well as the empty promises of financial institutions and capitalist consumer society.
[15] Parra was also recognized in the Latin American Women Artist Association, primarily for her role in educating disadvantaged youths and promoting minority rights.