A volcanic evening at Cape Schanck, 2024

Painting in collaboration with my environment, I oil paint on materials that I find local to the places I am compelled to reexamine. This painting reflects wild and personal time spent on the Mornington Peninsula on Boon Wurrung/ Bunurong Country in Victoria. Traversing the unpredictable weather, tumbling sand dunes, tangled tea tree, volcanic rock, salt bush and the dynamic ecosystems which form a natural buffer between bay, land and sea. The peninsula flora is unique and sparkly, my work incorporates the colours within the back burnt bush, salty mist, driftwood, burning sun and shimmering dew that glistens through the oil paint and reflects off the button grass. Like me, my paint is extrinsic yet found in this place. My adventures in nature inform my time in the painting studio. This work attempts to reflect the essence of this place and memory rather than offering an explicit representation. In this country our landscape is full of contradictions, vast beauty, deep loss and environmental tension. I hope my work can reveal some of my personal sense of love, loss and foreignness to this place.

Melbourne-based artist Kate McKenzie Lewis’ work is steeped in the Australian landscape. In 2022, Lewis achieved a Masters in Contemporary Art from the VCA, University of Melbourne. Since graduation she has continued her journeys into the Australian bush, 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. Working with found material, she paints on road signs and scrap metal found locally to her landscape. Lewis’ manipulation of perspective, light, colour and scale, piques the viewer’s curiosity creating an oscillation between imagined moments and real memory. Lewis’ work is transportive; the country she depicts both stirs and subverts the viewer’s memory.
Kate was a finalist in The Hadley’s Art Prize 2022 and the 2024 Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize.