Katherine Edwards McCubbin’s art practice explores the human condition and our connection with nature and the ephemeral. Her work begins with journal drawings, many of which become studies for larger oil paintings, arranged around such topics as female anatomy, botany, animals and domestic exotica. Antiquity and ancient cultures inspire her work.
Exploring in her early years, the shape, light, and tropical urban wilderness of Sydney’s North Shore on her doorstep – developed her artistic appetite. Winding pathways beside the water, lined with tropical floral explosions fashioned her impression of the sublime – from the microscopic to the grandiose, none of this being accidental. An 8 week artist residency in Rome in 2017 broadened her understanding of ruins, fragments and ancient history.
“Alchemy”, continues my preoccupation with water and nature, especially Italy’s Baroque water fountains and sculptures – the catalyst for the subject matter of these paintings. I carry my small sketch journal when travelling, and later transform these studies into paintings back in my St Kilda studio.”
Edwardian women botanists recorded the shape and texture of flora in journals, a practice that Katherine relates to. Katherine collects fragments, shell, feathers, stone, shards of pottery, modern and ancient and uses these objects to inspire the embrace of ethereality, beauty and the female form. It’s an expression of what she sees, and those things that she cannot see. To physically understand the presence, those echoes through time, captured and conveyed in paint.
