WORK
Stones whisper stories from the past. Their language travels through touch, smell, sound and their embedded memories.
When cleaving or cutting stone, I’m never sure what I might find. Fossils and knots of mica reveal themselves amidst iridescent streaks harbouring deep time secrets. Their unique characteristics and narratives, be they geological or cultural, allow me to create layers of meaning in a work.
ABOUT
Kate Butler is a mosaic artist, living and working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. Kate works with a range of materials and is particularly drawn to rocks, which she has been collecting for as long as she can remember. One of her strongest childhood memories from her ‘free range’, nomadic upbringing is of riding borrowed horses with a friend through the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia down to a local waterway to collect river stones.
Her previous career as a social researcher which involved making meaning from thousands of pieces of data eased the transition to creating her own visual language and making meanings from thousands of tesserae (individual pieces of hand cut material).
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Interested in the vitality of matter and unique dimensionality of mosaics where they are both surface and form, she uses repeated cuts to create textural complexity.
The temporary loss of sixty percent of her eyesight whilst studying at West Dean College of Art, UK opened the door to working in a more experimental way and creating distinct, textural works. Unable to see the interstices, she experimented with laying each tesserae at different angles, relying more on touch and what her hands were thinking and feeling rather than what she could see.
Kate’s studio is surrounded by native vegetals whose forms, patterns and texture provide boundless inspiration. Her creative practice provides a space to convey her concerns about the climate emergency and ecocide. Her current work explores our relationship with the natural world and asks what does it mean to be present living in a shifting, collapsing environment?
Her work has been exhibited in Australia, USA and Italy, and featured in several international publications, including Mosaique: 80 Contemporary Artists by R. Malaval Antoine, (2021). She has been a finalist in the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize, Opere Dal Mondo - Ravenna Mosaico Biennale, and Mosaic Arts International. In 2018, she established the Oro Mosaic Award to enable mosaicers access to world class professional development opportunities over a five year period. Kate is currently working on a new body of work for a solo show in 2025.