Meet Katherine, an artist and sculptor working across glass, clay, bronze, and beyond. Her practice blends the surreal and the domestic, often drawing on motherhood, mythology, and the mess of feeling.

Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Kate’s latest work explores family, fountains, and a marble fish head found in Albert Park.

“My artwork is my way of making sense of feelings and is an intersection of conceptual art and ‘craft’ or applied arts”

Do you find yourself drawn to one in particular, or does the material shift depending on the story you’re telling?

Glass is a very expensive medium, as is bronze, it’s a privilege when materials and facilities are available to freely create in these mediums. I’ve been making more in ceramics recently. The body of work I’m developing is based in very traditional figurative sculpture and clay is a classical starting point in the transference to other materials -and of course to ceramic in its vitrified form, as is my most recent sculpture. Clay is a wonderfully fluid medium for the development of ideas and skills.

Motherhood has long been a thread in your practice. How has your perspective on it shifted as your life — and your art — has evolved?

I went to graduate school in Illinois for three years when my daughter was four, it was just me and her and school and teaching; that’s when I deep dove into my feelings about being a parent and artist. As she’s gotten older, I’ve shifted my view (as an artist) of parenting and Frankie from managing my own feelings and perspectives within my work to attempting to view her as herself. For my most recent exhibition, at Public Record, I included a terracotta sculpture of which I modelled Frankie as a sphinx, displaying a man’s severed head sporting a squid as a hat.