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Kay Wood

Education
1999 MVA – Painting, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
1996 BVA (Hons) – Painting Sydney College of the Arts
1993 BA (Hons) - Deakin University

Instagram @kay___wood

Represented in Western Australia by STALA CONTEMPORARY

My original painting practice expanded when I began to incorporate and recontextualise other material elements of experience (past/present - both the same) including, but not limited to, cardboard packaging, wrapping, old fabric, found items, clay and resin. All these textural aspects work as both extensions of and vital liberators to my painting process and to self reflexivity through shared agency.

An ‘unknowing’ approach rather than a means-end manipulation of materials forms the vertebrae of my process led work in which I seek an engagement with the inherent unseen intelligence of all phenomena.

The surfaces of our natural world conceal more than they reveal. In explorations of surface, colour, shape and form, I look for an esoteric expression - a ‘something’ within things that simultaneously transcends the object. Understanding ‘what’ appears transiently - allowing only intangible glimpses that are available to perception contextually and provisionally, and are unable to be extracted as ‘data’.

I view all my work, not as ‘a painting or an object’ but as thing-areas where energy is concentrated, allowed to speak and be shaped by touch, time and memory. I try to preserve the life force of that energy against what Robert Sardello calls the technocratic ‘death forces of production and consumption’ which commodify even human spirit in globalised culture, so much so that creative self knowledge is increasingly eroded from within without our awareness.

In my practice of animistic materialism what is ultimately co-created will always be some kind of balancing act, between structure and the un-nameable…..an ongoing autonomous conversation with materiality within the pictorial imaginary.