Kate Conrick

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

Kate and Josh work together in their ceramics practice, combining 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 technically demanding, 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 moments and 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 notable for the iron-rich reds, glowing yellows and warm pinks that show up on both clay and canvas, and the expressive and gestural marks that show up in every medium she works in.