Kathryn Cowen is a Sydney based multidisciplinary artist working across the fields of painting, sculpture and installation. She draws on science fiction tropes to create speculative fictions in order to re-present visions of reality.
Her current paintings explore liminal spaces: thresholds, pathways and portals between one place and the next; revelling in colour and light, breaching the fluid membranes between inner and outer worlds to reveal the inter-connectedness of all things. These large-scale atmospheric landscapes sit alongside smaller figurative works and, like a dream sequence or memory, draw together random moments across time and space to form open-ended narratives.
In recent years Cowen has expanded her practice to bring her painted worlds into the third dimension. She combines industrial and organic materials to create hybridised biomorphic sculptural assemblages, collaborating with poet and artist Gareth Jenkins, to create site specific, multimedia immersive installations. Within the biofuturistic environments they create, creatures of toxic beauty glow under ultraviolet light, riding the resonant waves of an embedded soundscape. Lulled by the invocations of a poetic narrative, visitors are transported and invited to wonder at the future of nature.
Cowen studied painting at the National Art School, Sydney, where she was a finalist in the John Olsen Prize for Drawing and winner of the Chroma Paints Award, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) in 2007. Since this time she has exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions across a variety of commercial, artist run and institutional galleries and was recently included in the curated survey exhibition Painting Now 2023 at Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney. Kathryn has been a finalist in the North Sydney Art Prize (2022), Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2019), Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2021, 2019, 2015), Green Way Art Prize (2021), Calleen Art Prize (2018), Waverley Art Prize (2015), Little Things Art Prize (2021, 2020) and the Portia Geach Memorial Award (2006). She has participated in numerous residencies including the Cementa24 Artist-in-Residence Program (2023), Cloudbough Art Residency (2021), the Gunyah Artist-in-Residence Program (2020), the Movers and Shapers Collective Turondale Residency (2018), and the NAS Artist-in-Residence Program, Hill End (2015). Her work is held in collections throughout Australia, the Netherlands and the USA.
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