A&D ANNUAL 2021

Kate Minnett

Kate Minnett considers ongoing damage to Australia’s precious, fragile soils and ecologies since white settlement introduced a rapacious agrarianism, with the co-imposition of an acquisitive, polluting society and built order. While working with traditional painting and drawing, Kate has diversified to explore material reuse, fabrication and substitution, with a view to a near-future circular economy, including speculative object design. Kate’s recent work continues to be informed by life’s constants of disruption, change and renewal, and an observation that physics, chemistry and biology ‘will out’ regardless of what we do to the place. In 2021, Kate’s work has been produced under the maudlin suppression of COVID-19 lockdowns, resulting in a perceived need to declare the motto 'Resilience In Gloom'. This year Kate found joyous colour, sound and movement that foment volubly amid the visible dislocation and seeming finality of a rural graveyard, and the stories of the interred. Colour, music and movement signify change and renewal, and prove that life continues—forcefully—wherever there is oxygen, water and ground. Kaleidoscopic animation and collage are used to denote the physical tension of relentless layers of endings and beginnings, a joyful, chaotic dance in the moment for countless creatures bent and impelled with the will to live.