Katherine Blackburne
Bio: Katherine Blackburne was born in London, spent her formative years in Australia and currently lives and works in New York City. Her practice spans the media of painting, video art, installation, performance, printmaking and dance. With a primary concentration in painting.
In recent years her paintings were selected for participation in Art fairs such as Art Basel, Miami, Scope Miami, The Dublin Biennial and Art Melbourne, Australia. Her paintings are held in private collections in Australia, France, United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Germany and Sweden.
Her current paintings are an investigation of ‘nature’ and human constructed landscape as socio-cultural imaginary.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: These paintings reflect ongoing preoccupations with the non-human world—our human embeddedness within it, our various alienations from it, and to the extent to which we can and might belong to it. In engaging these ideas, my current work attempts to test the provenance and durability of certain motifs about femininity, particularly motherhood. Moving simultaneously within and against traditions of landscape painting and religious art, I train my eye on those moments during which certain kinds of erasure signal intensifications, where landscape becomes abode and the intensity of subjective ecstasy engages a forgetting of the self. It is in these moments of intensity, of metanoia of transformative play and connection, that the human becomes most effaced and most itself. Summoning a variety of figures which invoke both polytheistic ritual and images of ‘nature’ read in straightforwardly more scientific terms, this work moves towards suggesting a fascinating imbrication—if not dissolution—of nature and culture, and the species distinctions upon which this polarity usually subtends: of knowledge and story, of what is given and what is created, of the secular and sacred, the Christian and ‘pagan’, of science and myth, and of ostensibly ‘hard’ scientific fact and freewheeling metaphysical speculation.
L to R: Blue Zebra (98" x 72", Oil on canvas, 2021); This is a safe space (96" x 72", Oil on canvas, 2021); Everything, but mostly you (96" x 72", Oil on canvas, 2022)
First Year Exhibition
L to R: Poised (56” x 47”, Oil on canvas, 2021); Fleet (72” x 60”, Acrylic on canvas, 2021)
