Winner of the 2019 Artereal Gallery Mentorship Award, presented annually to one graduating Honours student from Sydney College of the Arts, Kate Coyne is an emerging artist to watch.

Working with unconventional materials such as foam and lead, Coyne has an almost magical way of taking unremarkable everyday materials and transforming them into elegant works of art imbued with a sense of both beauty and pathos that immediately captivates the viewer’s attention.

Interested in the intersection between time and gender, Coyne is concerned with the way in which the ageing female body is both perceived and embodied. Transforming queen-sized sheets of foam into a series of both monumental and intimate wall based forms which hover between painting and sculpture, Coyne evokes the female body through its various permutations over time – shifting, moving, growing, reshaping, absorbing – yet underlying this initial sense of movement or the passage of time is a sense of stillness. A sense of waiting. 

The metamorphosis or alchemical process which is so essential to the way that Kate Coyne works, allows her to create artworks which conjure and evoke an experience of the ageing female body which is both powerful and poignant to witness.