KATE STEWART ARTIST

As an artist I'm tapping into the collective unease arising from the cultural conditions of acceleration. Acceleration of technology, of images, of information, of anxiety about the future arising from a breakdown of certainty and truth. This troubled relationship with history and the present moment is expressed in my practice through an engagement with conditions of instability, precarity, turbulence and excess. In the ideas that inform it, and in the experimental ways in which my work is made.
Employing print-making, painting, assemblage and optical techniques to create installations, I'm working with disparate materials, uncertain outcomes and precarious forms of display.  Harnessing material agencies, minimal gestures and strategies of distortion, slippage, layering and composites, my work explores what can be revealed through this process of accretion.  I'm aiming to expand the sensibilities, visions and languages that can arise from accumulation and disintegration.

With a background in economics, design magazines and publishing, my journey into the art world began with a  Bachelor of Fine Arts from VCA, majoring in Painting. I'm currently enrolled in the MFA program at RMIT and my work has received the Fiona Myer Award for Painting, Linden New Arts Henry Award for Abstraction and has featured as a finalist in the Ravenswood Art Prize, the Fischer’s Ghost Art Prize and the Castlemaine Experimental Print Prize. My work has been included in multiple group shows and is in private collections around Australia.