Kay Wood Artist

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

Kay's work dances around a spontaneous and instinctive expression where paintings, clay and other relief type works combine (and recombine) the various formal elements of her practice. An attitude of playfulness is valued as the way to keep the creative door always open. Surfaces can vary from roughly hewn and densely coated to a thinner and more delicate use of paint, texture and materials. Mostly abstract to look at, Kay's work can also allude to, or involve, a figurative expression, emanating from her interest in fractal geometry and the infinite unseen intricacies of the universe. Fragments are an important element in her work, not being subsumed to the whole but asserting their presence within work without necessarily making any sense.

Believing that each mundane moment (or part) contains within it invisible patterns of universal energy and events, Kay's focus is the present moment of action - whatever the unconscious suggests is allowed — put down and layered onto — described elsewhere as a process of things always becoming, over the states of being through which they pass — aspects through which other things may be glimpsed as possibility. In practice this means an ongoing process of revealing and concealing. Rather than articulate a specific discourse, genre etc., her work simply draws on the relationship between herself and the phenomenal world. As with the materials in her studio, she visits and revisits her experiences: noticing, communicating, making and remaking. What we see is always potentially other than and therefore never finished. Works are often cut up, broken apart and reassembled (physically and psychologically) as is her understanding of life and her place within. Echoing Kurt Schwitters and his Merz pictures, the artist sees her work (life) as one of arrangements followed by rearrangements.

Kay has committed herself to follow the impulse from materiality to act, and to relinquish the ego's drive for explanation and closure by allowing the materials to dictate direction: the resultant cross pollination has suggested to her that the nature of 'being' is a continual present moment of acts, with implicate linkages forever explicating and unfolding and then folding back on themselves. Such linkages defy logical, linear thought and planning because any pattern or model that they may emerge from is unable to be accessed by human thought. Therefore there are no designs or pre-sketches for work, simply a form of doodling with materials until things begin to emerge.


Udo