Biography

Katherine Hattam lives and works in Melbourne. She studied English Literature and psycho-inflected Political Science at Melbourne University, not attending art school until she had been exhibiting regularly for ten years, whereupon she completed an MFA at the Victorian college of the Arts followed later by a PhD at Deakin University.

She was initially self-taught but grew up with an artist father, Hal Hattam, living in a house hung with works of such artists as Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Charles Blackman…

Her work is primarily two dimensional but includes three-dimensional objects made up from wooden kitchen chairs that first had been painted in primary colours by children, eventually making their way from kitchen to studio where they became spattered with paint and marked by life.

Katherine Hattam’s son William Mackinnon, who had been working at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, referred her to the work of Judd and John Chamberlain at the Dia Foundation out of New York and her 3D works came after seeing Judd’s ‘specific objects’ and Chamberlain’s paint-spattered twisted metal reconstructions from car bodies.

Her first works on book pages came as a response to the death of her mother, Kate Hattam, a great reader. Katherine has since collected books relating to her university studies – blue non-fiction and orange fiction paperbacks. At present her work is hanging in a collage exhibition entitled Stick It at the National Gallery of Victoria and in November 2010 she will have an exhibition of paintings at John Buckley Gallery, Richmond.