Katherine Hattam 'Mother Country'

What should I Call it?

"Pinch Grandma" said 2-year-old Lucky. So there is that. Then I have the tiny photograph emailed by childhood friend Winky Percival, third child of Mary, born Boyd, married Percival, then Nolan when her mother died. We see a mother leaning over a large pram, surrounded by three daughters and friend, Winky, all doting on baby brother John. Looking closer there is Winky pinching my sister Fran, thinking no one was looking.

Usually it’s children doing the pinching, but not always. An adult memory sticks in my head. Jack Hibberd, writer and friend, staying one weekend in the country in a house which had verandahs rather than decks, became irritated with children playing loudly on the verandah outside the room where he was reading, probably Balzac. He nipped outside, also hoping not to be seen by me, and pinched one of my children while telling them to be quiet.

The Pinch is the title of one of my jigsaw wood block prints and a series of paintings. That was a possible title for the show.

The Good and Bad Breast was another possibility. These paintings appeared from nowhere, or somewhere deep. I discovered one walking past a drawing on a canvas and thought "where did that come from?”, and maybe it could become a painting. In my life and out in the world there seem to be young women's breasts and babies all about. Hence the literal meaning.

On another level The Good and A Bad Breast has a very specific psychoanalytic meaning. I am late to really understanding this fully. My sister Fran has helped with her professional knowledge and experience. Decades ago I attended a postgraduate course in psychoanalytic theory, specifically on Melanie Klein. My assumption when babies were described as angry, fragmenting and filled with hate then love, was that these were examples of extreme, mad, crazy babies. It took me years to realise this was a description of the normal experience of Klein’s "good and bad breast".

My work sits on that line between the inner and the outside world. That outside world is represented by what is particular and peculiar to Australia, eg The Platypus, The Mother Country, the Strange Country. An image such as the wave (which is drawn from Hokusai’s wave), comes from a very long love affair with Japanese wood block prints, but also from surfing and being dumped by actual waves. Waves are there also in our experience of feminism and of covid.

I am so glad to have been able to translate my rediscovery of printmaking into reality with the skills of master printers, John Loan at Viridian and Martin King and Simon White at APW.

I finally decided to call this show Mother Country - I came up with it not in the shower, but while swimming laps.

— Katherine Hattam, 2022

Katherine Hattam held her first exhibition in 1978 at the George Paton & Ewing Gallery, alongside Helen Frankenthaler, and has exhibited regularly ever since. Exhibitions include The History Pictures at Bayside Gallery (2019), Language, Names, Lists and a Dream (2019), Seeing Through (2017), Sometimes (2015) and Consciousness Raising (2014) at Daine Singer, Desire First (2015) at Deakin University, Backwaters (2014) at LUMA, 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 Len Fox 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, Artbank, Heide, Art Gallery of South Australia, Deakin and La Trobe Universities, 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 and RACV.