Born 1989, Lismore NSW

 

Kathryn Dolby is a painter based in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, on Bundjalung land, Australia. Working from her home studio, Dolby’s practice is informed by an intuitive, playful, and emotionally charged approach to colour and line. Her paintings are psycho-geographic landscapes, expressing connections between the subconscious, the everyday, and the sublime. Through a tension between abstraction and representation, her work explores dialogue between gesture, memory, and the natural world.

Kathryn completed her BVA at Southern Cross University (SCU) in Lismore in 2014, where she was awarded the Lismore Regional Gallery Graduate Award. This prize included her first solo exhibition at the Lismore Regional Gallery in 2015. While at university, she also received the Rising Star Visual Arts Scholarship and the Kaske Award for Printmaking.
Kathryn has been a finalist in several national and local art awards, including the Wollumbin Art Award, Waverley Art Prize, BAM Prize, Hurford Hardwood Portrait Prize, and the Omina Art Prize. She was awarded the BAM Art Prize in 2020 for her painting ‘Fire Retardant over Landscape’. Kathryn has exhibited widely, including shows at regional galleries, SPRING1883 art fair in Melbourne, as well as with Amber Creswell Bell and Michael Reid Galleries in Sydney, Berlin, and the Southern Highlands.

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Her forthcoming exhibition is in Sydney at Nasha Gallery, with Amber Wallis ~September 2026.

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'My Painting practice is grounded in an intuitive, process-led approach, shaped by an ongoing engagement with my surrounding environment and the shifting rhythms of the natural world. Working primarily in my home studio, I draw from my lived experience of motherhood, interior and exterior spaces, light, seasonal colour, sound, and movement to trace the felt qualities of place. These impressions form a starting point for abstraction, where form remains fluid and open to slippages. I’m interested in thresholds between the everyday and the unfamiliar, where perception softens and the known gives way to something more sensed than seen. My work moves between bodily and environmental states, where distinctions between interior and exterior begin to blur.

The motif of ‘the curtain’ has become both a visual and conceptual device for revealing and concealing. It gestures toward what is hidden: emotion, spirit and the layered nature of experience. Through layering, erasure, and thin washes of paint, the work resists fixed representation. Rather than describing landscape, I approach painting as a space to hold sensation, memory, and transformation, where the body and its environment remain in flux, and not fully separable.

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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