Kathryn Dolby
b. 1989

Selected works
Exhibitions
Artist CV

Kathryn Dolby was born in Lismore, and currently lives on Bundjalung land, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Working from her home studio, Dolby’s practice is informed by an intuitive, playful, and emotionally charged approach to colour and line. Her paintings are psycho-geographic landscapes, expressing connections between the subconscious, the everyday, and the sublime. Through a tension between abstraction and representation, her work explores dialogue between gesture, memory, and the natural world.

Kathryn completed her BVA at Southern Cross University (SCU) in Lismore in 2014, where she was awarded the Lismore Regional Gallery Graduate Award. This prize included her first solo exhibition at the Lismore Regional Gallery in 2015. While at university, she also received the Rising Star Visual Arts Scholarship and the Kaske Award for Printmaking.

As Dolby explains, 'my painting practice is grounded in an intuitive, process-led approach, shaped by an ongoing engagement with the landscape and the shifting rhythms of the natural world. Working primarily in my home studio, I draw from my experiences of motherhood, interior and exterior spaces, light, seasonal colours, sounds, and movement to translate the felt qualities of place. These impressions serve as a starting point for abstraction, where form becomes fluid and open to interpretation. I’m interested in the thresholds between the everyday and the sublime, the representational and the abstract. My work explores liminal spaces; those zones of transition where perception softens and the known gives way to something more felt than seen. The paintings often reflect internal states, tracing a dialogue between memory, sensation, and the subconscious.

Since becoming a mother, and in response to increasingly dramatic weather events, my view of the landscape has changed; often mediated through windows, screens, or a passing bedroom curtain. The curtain has become both a visual and symbolic motif, revealing and concealing, offering glimpses into the unknown. It gestures toward what is hidden: emotion, spirit and the layered nature of experience. Through thin washes of paint, layering and erasure, the landscape becomes a metaphor; a shifting mirror through which to explore being, longing, and the intangible.'