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Artist Statement 

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"Metamorphoses" poses the question of our time. Have we got time?  I invite you, the audience, to think about it. Stop and slow down. Consider ourselves anthropomorphic, sharing precious space with other organisms. How can we survive together on a crowded planet. How can we recapture a spiritual lineage, and reimburse it with a spirit of the potential? The future exhibition title is inspired by poet Ovid's approach to his book Metamorphosis. He interpreted greek mythology in an arbitrary fashion, by jumping from one transformation tale to another. My work explores the idea of a non-binary relationship between humans and the natural world, and nature as a reflection of the psyche and spirit. I am interested in the more mysterious aspects of one’s lived experience; of being a celestial body living on this planet, living in nature and urbanity, how to make sense of the experience of both isolation and connection. 

 

My paintings evoke strange places and inner worlds, and explore the relationship between human and animal; drawing upon my local environment. The experience of ‘self’ and one’s senses are interpreted through an illusory habitat, and its botanical, animal and plant forms. Animal avatars act as emotional doubles, in the process of metamorphosis, human and animal in anthropomorphic fusion with each other. The portrayal of animals also reflects an artist’s creative plight - rebellion, instinct, authenticity, freedom, solitude. You will discover frequently used visual motifs and symbols, stemming from my fascination with illustrations from Edwardian fairy-tales, and medieval alchemical drawings. 

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I see my painting process as an intimate performance, a serendipitous marriage of spontaneity with the intellectual.  The physical encounter with the picture surface, being in the moment, whilst exploring the past via the conceptual realm of memories and experiences. I often imagine what it would have been like to live in the shoes of historical women of botany, such as empress Josephine Bonaparte (who collected Australian exotica), and colonial-era Australian botanists Georgiana Molloy and Olive Pink, who worked with first nations indigenous people to help identify native plants and herbs, their discoveries recorded via journal drawings and diaries. Pages from my drawing journals attempt to describe my relationship to nature, the universe, infusing quotidian experiences into an alchemical interpretation on the paint surface, of what is felt in the moment, what could exist beyond our conditioned way of seeing the world around us.  It is a hope that human beings, fauna and flora can one day coexist in balance, and we can counteract the increasingly shrinking natural world, environmental destruction and horrors of war, i offer the initial concept sketches for this utopian vision...a symbolic language, a love letter to femininity and nature." (Katherine Edwards McCubbin, 2024).

 

"The images are within the tradition of Beardsley and Blake, big names, but there is a divine use of space and composition, that draws the subject matter out from the surreal and into the recognisable. For this, Katherine imposes a heightened degree of detail and limitless depth. The depth itself, is a swirling vortex of both texture and form, receding though the picture plane and into another space. This is when the spaces unite, and to unite it all, a figure, a face a torso and the weightless, floating, ethereal, spirits filling the void. The dream like quality extends across the composition, flowers become faces, trees, attenuated and anthropomorphic, are figures, that rise and fall amongst an entanglement of moss, lichen, leaf-litter, and the firm embrace of the ground itself.  

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Ever since the Pyramids, and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were unearthed, we as humans have tried to evoke the profound role the environment plays in shaping our perception. From the decorative filigree of the Pompeiian interiors, in which vegetation, lush and evocative, shared a world with humans and exotic beasts; we have been drawn to the relativism of us as both ‘nature’ and ‘animal’. Many were borne by a European tradition of leaves, landscapes and myth. For others, a landscape and myth unadorned by paint, but alive in the 'spirit of place'. In Aboriginal Australia its called “country”,  and encompasses a reality beyond the physical realm. For those not attuned, their receptors are dulled by modernity and economic bottom line, they would rather it be blown up into fragments. Because those fragments of connection to a spiritual place are long gone. Which poses the question, perhaps we need to go backwards? Rather than pretend to go forwards. Its a paradox that haunts those who think Martian colonies will save us.

 

Sadly, with the age of enlightenment, and the wonders of natural history collecting, it became a manifest destiny for humans to exploit and derive wealth from “ nature” as an end in itself.  Science and art have always held a deep bond, because they’re above all ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’ disciplines. Without them we become mired in the world of certainty and the dull plod of ideology. What a delight then, an artist who recaptures the spiritual yearning of the ancients, and yet reimburses it with a spirit of the potential for us to ‘re- invent’ ourselves. Poised somewhere between ideology, a fractured environment and the conflict between the humans, and the rest of creation."

 (David McCubbin 2022)