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.
murmurations, 2022
A series of small print/paintings derived from the source material/imagery of William Morris wallpaper designs. Here I’m experimenting with the process of making works with an embossed surface derived from a digital image.. In this instance there is a connection to the embossed surfaces of flocked wallpaper. I’m filtering/translating these images through a degraded contemporary technological lens, working with the designs of William Morris, who himself was looking back to the values of a different time. Rejecting industrial modernity, Morris sought a return to handcraftsmanship and a kind of Romanticised Medievalism. With Morris’s iconic designs I saw the opportunity to marry the language of the digital halftone with the underlying decorative symmetry to highlight the frictions between the past and the contemporary experience.