Katherine Hattam
Consciousness Raising
2 April - 3 May 2014
Katherine Hattam’s exhibition Consciousness Raising is a series of new works on paper. Reflections on the seventies and consciousness raising groups (which sought to raise awareness of female oppression) are the starting point for the works. In a combination of drawing and collage, autobiographical elements and domestic details, pieces of second wave feminist texts, pages, book spines and covers, Hattam explores, plays with and depicts a psychological state of mind, that of reflection. Rather than providing a direct comment, these works are about the artist looking back to a formative period of her past.
Katherine Hattam held her first exhibition in 1978 at the George Paton & Ewing Gallery, alongside Helen Frankenthaler and has exhibited regularly ever since. Recent exhibitions include Inventory (2010) and Book Covers (2009) at John Buckley Gallery, Staying on Message (2008) at Australian Galleries, Landscape of Longing (2013) at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Under the Influence (2007) at Warrnambool Art Gallery, Innocent Works (2008) at Bendigo Art Gallery, and at the National Gallery of Victoria: This and Other Worlds: Contemporary Australian Drawing (2008), Stick It! Collage in Australian Art (2010) and The Naked Face: Self-portraits (2010-11).
Hattam was Australia-China Fellow with a studio at the Beijing Art Academy (2003 and 2005) and exhibited Cut and Paste at the Pickled Art Centre, Beijing. Hattam has won the Banyule and Robert Jacks Drawing Prizes, has been short-listed many times in the Dobell Drawing Prize, the National Works on Paper Prize and Arthur Guy and Geelong Gallery Painting Prizes. She holds a BA in Literature and Politics from the University of Melbourne, an MFA Painting from VCA and a PhD from Deakin University.
Her work is in the public collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, Warrnambool Art Gallery and Bendigo Art Gallery and private and corporate collections including George Patterson, Minter Ellison, National Bank of Australia, Potter Warburg, Smorgon, the Darling Foundation, Hummerston Clark and RACV.
