Born 1989, Lismore NSW

 

Kathryn Dolby is an emerging visual artist residing in the Northern Rivers, NSW. Dolby’s paintings reflect an intent and expressive curiosity about the quiet and seemingly insignificant in-between moments of everyday life. Through an intuitive exploration of colour and reductive forms, her current investigations delve into the emotional and physical landscapes that are deeply immersed in her transition into and through motherhood.

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"When painting in my home studio I think about moving through the landscape and how fleeting the experience is. With thinned down paint I chase my memories of it, the colours, shapes and light that shift with the weather. I’m also interested in how our view shifts with changes in circumstance. After becoming a mother and the recent weather events of bushfires, floods pandemic, the landscape may be experienced more through a car window, a screen, or a curtain in the bathroom. I’ve employed the ‘curtain’ as a device to obscure the landscape and blur the space between inside and outside”.

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"Kathryn Dolby is an artist whose process starts when she is going about her daily life, transiting through the world. Motion, colour and environment lodge themselves in her memory as painterly thoughts to be reclaimed in the studio through the process of laying down her material. Her works are expressed by feel and responsiveness to the process of painting"

Kezia Geddes, Curator - Lismore Regional Gallery 

 

 

"There is a lightness of touch, and whimsy in Dolby’s paintings and a joyful promise in her responses to some of the most humanising subjects, the sulphuric yellow of wattle season, or a vibrant found object beaming at her on a glum day"

Luke Sciberras, Australian Artist 

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"Kathryn Dolby’s paintings are windows are archways are portals are thresholds. For all their cyanic calm and power, her paintings act as wordless notes. She preserves and transports intimate observations about the present into the future with every gesture made; and, as the future becomes painted in the present, the painting becomes an archive, a memory, a portal, a window into the past."

Emma Finneran, Artist & Arts Writer

 

 

"...most coercive is the presence of a kind of literary, lyrical abstraction: the use of formal qualities to tease at narrative, to activate what Nabokov ignites in Pale Fire, a kind of footnoted space, a bottom-of-the-page poetry."

 

Murray Paterson, Former lecturer at Southern Cross University

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"While her art remains immersed in landscape it simultaneously evokes a mystical and meditative encounter that brings soulful relief in uncertain times."

Sharne Wolff, Independent Arts Writer