This collection of paintings reflects time spent on Boon Wurrung/ Bunurong Country, the Victorian Peninsula. In collaboration with my environment, I layered paint on sheets of scrap metal and recycled materials found foraging the local tip and building sites. Discarded canvasses reincarnated to reveal a sense of the place they once called home.

Traversing the trails and painting ‘en plein air’ informed my time in the painting studio. Each painting is a memory of time spent in this liminal place, the bush between, where the bay and ocean come to meet on the Peninsula. These works attempt to reflect the essence of these special places rather than an explicit representation. Adding then subtracting, the paint hides and reveals the metal beneath and the harsh beauty of the discarded in contrast with the organic oily forms of the natural world as I see it.

Restricted by the gamble of found materials, each painting surface presents a new challenge in scale and shape. The peninsula landscape is rugged but sparkly, filled with ancient volcanic rock and tall canopies. Memories from Flinders, Pulpit Rock, Black Rock Beaches, Cape Schanck, towering cypress trees. Sandstone cliffs a natural divider of dynamic ecosystems between land and sea. Once more and then again is my exploration of colours and glimmers within the volcanic rock, arid sand dunes, crumbly sandstone, salty mist, tangled tea tree, saltbush, driftwood, burning sun and shimmering light that glistens through the oil paint and reflects off the ocean. Like me, the scrap metal is extrinsic yet found in this place. In this country our landscape is full of emotion- vast beauty, dangerous terrain, it is deeply loved, forever mourned and fighting to survive.

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.