Kathryn Dolby – The Fountain
- Kathryn Dolby
- 5—28 Jun 2025
- Download now
Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present The Fountain – a sublime and expansive new body of work by Bundjalung/Northern Rivers-based contemporary painter Kathryn Dolby. The opening of Dolby’s latest solo exhibition coincides with the exciting announcement of her representation by Michael Reid Northern Beaches.
Taking an intuitive, playful and emotionally charged approach to colour and line, Dolby creates psycho-geographic paintings of the landscapes surrounding her. Through gesture and abstraction, her landscapes explore the connections between the subconscious, the everyday and the sublime.
“The Fountain builds on my desire to find an interesting intersection between abstraction and representation,” says the artist, whose elegant and expressive paintings beautifully balance the intimately personal with the grandly transcendent: moments of tension and release, detail and dissipation, quiet poeticism and dramatic flourish. “I hone in on considered detail and abstract it through expressive gestures. It’s a push and pull sensation of drawing in and releasing out.”
Dolby maps this push-pull dynamic onto her process of drawing from memory, letting the mind’s eye’s haziness, abstractions and misrememberings inform the resulting pictures. “What you’re left with evokes more of a feeling than a clear scene,” she says. “There is a grappling with the unknown in these paintings … the more simplified and pared back the compositions are, the more the paintings begin to lift off into something new.”
While bringing her new series to life, Dolby became interested in The Fountain as a capacious metaphor, with its various meanings seeming apt to describe the many currents that move through her paintings. “Fountains throughout art history have symbolised rebirth, healing, holy water, the uncontrollable forces of nature and the human experience,” she says. “It’s a flow of water in constant transition between here and there. Like ourselves, moving through life, shifting, changing. The elements mirror this also and continue to reappear in my paintings as a dance with colour.”
All works from The Fountain can be explored and acquired below or by request ahead of the exhibition’s official opening on Thursday, 5 June. Kathryn Dolby is represented by Michael Reid Northern Beaches.
For all enquiries, please email northernbeaches@michaelreid.com.au
What were some of your early creative influences?
The freedom and drama inherent in Abstract Expressionist paintings influenced me in the early days. After my studies at art school, I discovered an equal love for the opposite – minimalist, monochromatic paintings by artists such as Joseph Marioni and Robert Ryman. These influences continue to inform my practice, where I look to capture both an active release in the way the paint is applied quickly and expressively, yet I also block out areas to create stillness for the eye and tensions in the overall painting. I long to create this sense of balance between the active and the quiet.
How did you develop your approach to painting? Are there themes, ideas, styles or techniques you often return to in your work?
My approach is very intuitive. I think because my influences are quite varied, my approach is to combine various elements from different styles to find my own visual language. I love the dramatic play with light and shadow in Renaissance paintings by Vermeer and Caravaggio, the quietness in monochromatic works by Marioni and Agnes Martin, and then the active release by expressionist painters such as Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning. I’m excited when the blending of genres and paint application occurs within a painting or throughout a body of work. It feels more multifaceted, like life!
What was the starting point for The Fountain and how did the series evolve through the painting process?
After my last exhibition, Feeling Into Form, which was an exploration of the subconscious and the role of intuition in the studio, I visited an exhibition of my great, great aunt Grace Crowley’s abstract, modernist paintings. There was a particular piece that I gravitated to due to a shape within the overall composition. I later realised that it was very similar to the shapes I found in a landscape close to home that I had taken photos of, which were hanging in my studio.
I wanted to investigate this further as I’m fascinated by how inspiration can leave a trail of breadcrumbs. I began painting this shape through the gaps in the trees. It felt like it was reaching a light source. This developed into paintings that draw you into the centre, into the heart of the painting, into a sense of colour and light, movement and stillness and into a sense of quiet wonder. The paintings are also fuelled by dramatic weather events – a sense of water – and become a dance with the elements.
How does the series build on your previous work?
It builds on my desire to find an interesting intersection between abstraction and representation. I hone in on considered detail and then abstract it through expressive gestures with paint. It’s a push-and-pull sensation of drawing in and then releasing out. Like drawing from the very nature of memory and how it isn’t completely clear, but fades and blurs. What you’re left with evokes more of a feeling rather than a clear scene. There is also more of a grappling with the unknown in these paintings, and I think the more simplified and pared-back the compositions are, the more the paintings begin to lift off into something new … something for me to continue to trust and refine over the coming years.
Could you tell us about some of your favourite works from the series?
At the Heart of Things is one of the very first paintings I completed for this exhibition, where I let my subconscious take over and I painted freely. When I came up with the exhibition title, The Fountain, I was thinking about how a fountain is ‘a source’ and an outpouring. I was thinking about the source of our decisions, why we choose something … where is that decision coming from?
For me, this exhibition is about painting from the heart; it’s about love, chaos and the nature of moving through both. This painting pulls you into the centre and hopefully evokes a sense of the heart and stirs that which is most important or most present. For the same reasons, I also really like the little painting Moving Through. For me, it successfully combines and captures a sense of transition, gesture, light and colour while also evoking the act of moving through an emotional and physical landscape.
Could you tell us more about the narrative connecting this collection of works?
The Fountain – as a title and as a metaphor – interested me because of its multiple meanings. Fountains throughout art history have symbolised rebirth, healing, holy water, the uncontrollable forces of nature and the human experience. It’s a flow of water that is in constant transition between here and there. Like ourselves, moving through life, shifting, changing. The elements mirror this and continue to reappear in my paintings as a dance with colour.
What other projects are you looking forward to working on in the coming year?
I have a few projects and ideas brewing to collaborate with artists of different disciplines, as well as a show of mother painters from regional areas. Also, over the next year, I’ll be shifting my focus to residencies! I’m curious about how travelling to new landscapes and environments will influence my practice after years of working from my home studio.
