Kathryn Dolby

b. 1989

Selected works
Installation views
Press release

Waterhen
18 September—18 October 2026

Landscape can be oppressively horizontal. We live wedged between earth and sky, in hot friction between two eternal planes. The sky in particular is a monolithic quilt, a canopy from which there is no escape. Trees, cliffs and undulating topographies serve to relieve us of this tension, but rarely to the point of ascension. Perhaps that’s why we dream of flying, climbing mountains, or digging deep into the earth. These human impulses signal an inherent refusal to be bound by nature’s geometry — we’ve always preferred to live in hope.

Kathryn Dolby does not wrestle the horizon like other painters do. She rearranges our world so that we are free to move, or be, wherever we like. In her paintings, we glide and slide through diffuse doors, windows, escalators, chutes, and portals — a unique buoyancy in her architecture allows us a range of alternative states. A vertical painter, a painter of light and rain, her offering is transcendence from our stratic composition.

The Waterhen, or Australasian Swamphen, is a long-legged, short-winged bird; a reluctant flier. It lives precisely at the threshold where land, air, and water collide. Granted the freedom of open air, it chooses instead to root itself in the wet. Beyond the fleeting appearance of floating red orbs that mimic its vivid beak, there is no literal bird captured in these works. Instead, the spirit of the Waterhen guides Dolby’s practice deep into the alluvial, tidal ecosystems of Bundjalung Country. Like the bird seeking the sky, Dolby’s marks break the flatness of the landscape, mapping the fluid margins of our interior lives.

These are wet paintings, but not in a stagnant or submissive way. Instead, Dolby is interested in a more volatile, spontaneous, and uncertain aquosity. The works are birthed in a studio shed in Dunoon, where holes in a rusted corrugated iron roof allow the wetness of the landscape to physically enter the studio. For Dolby, leaks are not something to fight, but a bridge between interior and exterior worlds.

Curtains sit in front of open skies, frames illuminate trees, while platforms and stages float at the foot of rolling hills. Dolby is not interested in defining familiar environments, but in merging familiar sensations. These are metaphysical spaces bound only by paint’s viscosity.

Dolby also invites unexpected motifs: single meandering lines navigating the surface, contours of astral shapes, disembodied figures, unrooted trees, and dark forms invading a shoreline. Her tendency to place surprising objects in surprising places encourages a thorough engagement; these cameos evidence a painter concerned with exposing
landscape’s full poetic potential.

The gestures are urgent and confident, gossamer marks that accumulate and vibrate as voluminous rhythms before settling into forms. The paintings in Waterhen possess an undeniable lightness, executed with the assurance of a heavy painter. In the same way that the rainforest can be simultaneously cacophonous and quiet, Dolby paints with an active stillness. She makes her marks in a rush—not just because she is a mother whose time and space are precious, but because she is looking to uncover truths about our relationship to a
world that is constantly changing.

Simultaneously restrained and generous, Kathryn’s works perform as containers for familiar and undefinable feelings that spill over and rush into us. Dolby reminds us that water, and painting itself, doesn’t just free us of the rigidity of the landscape, but are cleansing, hopeful resources that are vital to the human spirit.

—Henry Curchod