Kate Stewart is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne working primarily in spatial installation and expanded painting. Her practice is engaged with notions of instability, disruption and dissonance.
My practice responds to the unease of the present moment, shaped by conditions of acceleration: of technology, images, information, and the erosion of certainty that accompanies them. I work with instability, precarity, and excess as both subject and method, engaging a troubled relationship between history and the now. These concerns are explored through experimental processes that embrace uncertainty, contingency, and material volatility.
Working across expanded painting, assemblage, print and installation, I employ disparate materials, provisional structures, and precarious modes of display. Through minimal gestures, layering, distortion, slippage and accumulation, I harness material agencies to generate meaning that emerges through accretion as much as through breakdown. My installations often operate as relational systems, where form, surface and spatial tension invite embodied encounter and sustained looking.
My background spans economics, design publishing and editorial work, prior to completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and a Master of Fine Arts at RMIT University. My work has received the Fiona Myer Award for Painting, the Linden New Art Henry Award for Abstraction, and has been recognised in national prizes including the Ravenswood Art Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and the Castlemaine Experimental Print Prize. I exhibit regularly and my work is held in private collections across Australia.
In 2025 I founded Minnie Artspace, a small, curated project space and residency program in Sandringham, Naarm/Melbourne. Operating within a domestic model, Minnie extends my commitment to material experimentation, conceptual rigour and community-building, supporting contemporary artists through time, space and dialogue outside traditional institutional frameworks.