Kathryn Dolby
b. 1989
b. 1989
Selected works
Exhibitions
Artist CV
Driving along a wet road close to home, I noticed a waterhen standing tall in the middle of it. Its red beak and deep blue feathers glistened as it held its ground, protecting its young. The quiet resilience of this moment lingered with me as I painted. It spoke to an instinct to remain present and protective within a constantly changing world.
I’m interested in how images form before language. Through painting, I follow memories and associations as they move between states of curiosity, tenderness, urgency and transformation. Since becoming a mother, my relationship to place has changed. Returning each day to the same rooms, roads and familiar landscapes, the repetition of the ordinary has become a space of poetic potential. Memories and sensations mix with windows, puddles and rain. In the studio, these encounters unfold and slip through painting into a kind of dream
logic. Trees become figures, conduits and passageways; mountains morph into breasts; curtains become weather; and gestures dissolve into water. I’m drawn to how these small moments have the power to build within a painting and enter what Philip Guston referred to as the ‘metaphysical plane’.
Through a process of layering, removing and rebuilding with both acrylic and oil paint, I hope to distil the nuances of experience into forms that remain open to multiple truths, inviting the viewer’s own memories and associations to enter.’
Kathryn Dolby is a painter based on Bundjalung land in the Northern Rivers region, NSW. 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 intimate, psycho-geographic landscapes, expressing connections between chaos and beauty, the subconscious, the everyday, and the sublime. Through a tension between abstraction and representation, her work explores dialogue between her experiences of motherhood, 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.
Kathryn has been a finalist in several national and local art awards, including the Wollumbin Art Award, Waverley Art Prize, BAM Prize and the Hurford Hardwood Portrait Prize. She was awarded the BAM Art Prize in 2020 for her painting ‘Fire Retardant over Landscape’. Kathryn has exhibited widely, including shows at Tweed, Lismore and Grafton regional galleries, SPRING1883 art fair and in Melbourne, Sydney and Berlin.
