Sydney born, Melbourne based, artist Kate McKenzie Lewis’ work is steeped in the Australian landscape. Painting and the bush have been two constants in Kate’s life. Time spent in Booderee Country (Jervis Bay), Gadubanud lands in the Victorian Otways and Boon Wurrung/ Bunurong Country on the Victorian Peninsula, has given Kate the opportunity to examine the visual intersection of place, process and paint.
After graduating with a Masters in Contemporary Art from the VCA in 2022, Kate continued her exploration of the bush and coast; walking, camping, running and of course painting.
Painting smaller ‘en plein air’ works, as well as larger ‘alla prima’ (in one sitting) pieces back in her Melbourne studio - forever blurring lines between fiction and reality.
Painting in collaboration with her environment, Lewis paints her landscapes on sheets of scrap metal and recycled materials found local to the places she is compelled to examine. Her adventures in bush and on the coast, traversing the trails and hunting/scavenging trips to the local tip inform her subsequent time in the studio. Adding, then subtracting her paint to reveal the metal beneath. Translating the harsh beauty of the discarded foreign material to contrast with the organic oily forms of the natural world as she sees it.
Lewis’ manipulation of perspective, light, colour and scale, piques the viewer’s curiosity creating an oscillation between imagined moments and real memory. Kate’s work is transportive; the country she depicts both stirs and subverts the viewer’s memory.
Drawn to the oil-laden Australian landscape and entangled within her eucalypts, Kate grapples with the complicated tension of the land. Kate feels that in this country our landscape is full of contradictions, vast beauty, deep loss and it is this environmental tension that she wants to explore in her painting practice. She hopes her work can reveal some of her personal sense of love, loss and foreignness to a place.
Lewis is a Hadley’s Art Prize, Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize and a Len Fox Painting Award Finalist.