About Kate

Kate Conrick is half of a creative art and ceramics duo with her partner Josh Cubbin, currently working together on Ngunnawal Country, Canberra.

Kate has always experienced a compulsive drive to create – to respond to her perceptions and memories through paint, or ink, or clay. But after pursuing a career in commercial design, it’s only been after a period of intense loss in both her and her partner’s lives with the loss of each of their fathers within months of each other that she has embraced her own artistic practice again – leaning into the compulsion to create as a path to finding that peace, stillness and connection so present in the land around her.

Having worked for several years to transform their lives to focus on their practice, Kate and Josh now work together to create ceramic pieces, where they combine the skilful craftsmanship of wheel thrown stoneware with carved and painterly surfaces – interchangeably collaborating on pieces as they move through the process of throwing, shaping, and glazing clay. Their work is a mix of functional and show pieces, often exploring the materiality of the clay itself, and its connection to the Australian earth it came from.

Kate finds balance for the slow and careful practice of ceramics with more fleeting, abstract paintings - often created quickly in single sessions, when she takes over their combined art/ceramics home studio with giant canvases.

With an ever-present sense of movement across her work in both clay and paint, her paintings are a compulsive and intuitive response to the Australian landscape, combining colours, perception and memory to kindle those feelings of connection to place.

Kate is ever striving to capture that immense and gentle awe of the world, so present in the wind, and the ground and the sky. Her work is recognisable with distinctive iron-rich reds, washes of sky pink and the greens of eucalyptus and pine, which show up on both clay and canvas, and the expressive and gestural marks she uses across both mediums.

 

Awards and exhibitions

Current

  • Lava Cafes, Kingston, Phillip, Weston, ACT Australia – work exhibited 2019-current
  • Grainger Gallery, ACT Australia – Dust Storms Dance group landscape exhibition March 2024
  • Tyger Gallery, Yass NSW Australia – stockroom 2023-current
  • Art Edit Magazine – work featured Autumn edition March 2023
  • Art Directory Australia – Autumn Garden online exhibition March 2023
  • Aspire Gallery, Paddington QLD Australia  – Petite Pieces finalist March 2023
  • Aspire Gallery, Paddington QLD Australia  – Little Feature exhibition, April 2023
  • Aspire Gallery, Paddington QLD Australia  – Rustle exhibition, May 2023

    Past

    • Curvy 6 - Featured in the 2009 Curvy book 6, featuring the most exciting 100 female artists from 40 countries around the world.
    • Curvy 6 - Exhibition, Sydney 2009
    • The Gallery of Australian Design - Best Of Exhibition, Canberra 2009
    • University of Canberra & DesignEmergency, Prize for Professionalism in Creative Production and Presentation, 2009
    • University of Canberra & Voodoo, Design Professionalism Prize, 2009
    • Murmur Collaborative Illustration Exhibition, Canberra 2009 and 2010