Katherine Hattam / About

This year I was awarded the James Northfield scholarship and began making lithographs at the Australian Print Workshop with master printer Martin King. Covid of course interrupted.

Works on paper – drawing, printmaking and collage – are a continuing thread in my practice.

My first works were pencil drawings on writing paper of my family and our furniture. Our mother had taken her three oldest children, teenage daughters, to a friend’s creative dance class in an abandoned city warehouse. This was to support the young dancer. Though trying really hard to “be a leaf” or a lamppost was excruciating, that evocative abandoned space uncovered some other creative desire.

I began making the small observational drawings which grew from pencil to charcoal and eventually to large sheets of cartidge paper. I strung wires round my bedroom hanging drawings from them in this homemade exhibiting space.

Family friend, artist Arthur Boyd, visited and when shown these works told my parents to take me out of school. My parents, knowing the tough artist life up close, had no such intention. I was academic and yet I wavered. I put together an application for the then National Gallery School but didn’t apply and continued to make black and white drawings for the next fifteen years.

I also completed an honours degree at the University of Melbourne in literature and political science – so called, but really psychoanalytic theory. All these influences have remained a focus and drive in my work. – KH

Watch Katherine Hattam on NAVA’s Artist File.