Kate Dorrough

Artist Statement

Kate Dorrough
 

‘Awakening Time’ expresses a growing awareness of the perception, importance, management and rights given to rivers. Both rivers and water are a finite resource, its significance reverberating within our collective unconscious. In a continuum of floods and droughts we have largely lost the interconnected and innate language of rivers.

Exhibiting paintings alongside hand built ceramic vessels and textiles, my multi disciplinary art practice is an intersection and cross fertilisation between mediums, explorative and intuitive in approach. Mark making and a sensitivity to surface has become an ever expanding visual dialogue and an evolving personal iconography.

Initially painting and drawing on paper and constructed and collaged resourced textiles and canvas working plein air on the banks of many rivers, I incorporate and respond to found materials at hand. Sticks, leaves and river stones become a template in combination with an intuitive observation and the accidental. Returning to the studio hand building stoneware vessels combined with an alchemic fusion of layered multiple glaze firings, in conversation and in unison with acrylic paintings on linen and hand stitching the textile works with cotton thread, they become a palimpsest of mark making. Informed by the shapes, sounds, and resonant memories of the river they speak of felt experiences and layered histories.

In my urban home studio, often waking in the early twilight hours, I find restoration and an alignment resolving paintings. It is a time of respite from daily concerns of raising children, commitments and menopause symptoms. The darkened slumber of the surrounding sleep is transformed to an abstracted and poetic space. A metaphor for an awakening awareness of ecological concerns in a time within our society of ecological necessity, the incessant darkness of war and noise with distractions of social media and AI alterations.

The inferred language of symbolic and calligraphic gestural marks in these works are embedded within the ceramic glaze, textile and paint. These embedded narratives and memories offer transformation and renewal. The act of hand building ceramics using the archaic technique of coiling clay from the earth, layering of glaze and paint, and hand stitching, all reiterates a rhythmic mediative and physical connectedness. Slowing down, the hand links to the mind. The stitching on the textile works acts as a drawing which transverses the surface reminiscent of ancient tracks across the land, echoing a domestic sense of care; to repair and mend. As in the care needed to maintain river systems with regenerative farming practices, where active listening and observation offers a way to understand and to hear the calling of the river. 

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Essay

Katherine Roberts,

Senior Curator, Exhibitions & Collections,

Manly Art Gallery & Museum

ECOLOGICAL LISTENING

At the heart of this exhibition is an ecological consciousness. Kate Dorrough’s work responds to a growing awareness of the importance and rights of rivers, recognising water as both a finite resource and a vital force that shapes collective experience. Dorrough suggests that contemporary society has become disconnected from the innate language of rivers, a language once understood through careful observation and a sustained relationship with the natural world. Through painting, ceramics and textiles, Dorrough seeks to recover fragments of this language, creating works that speak of interconnection, renewal and care.

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Ecological listening offers a framework for understanding Dorrough’s practice. Rather than treating the landscape as a passive subject to be observed, ecological listening proposes a relationship of attentiveness and reciprocity between humans and the natural world. Contemporary thinkers such as David Abram argue that rivers, forests and ecosystems communicate through patterns, rhythms and material processes that modern societies have largely forgotten how to perceive. Through gesture, texture and repetition, Dorrough’s paintings, ceramics and textiles register the movements of water, the accumulation of time, and the subtle traces of environmental change.

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In this exhibition, Awakening Time, Dorrough draws us into a contemplative space where landscape becomes language and where the voices of rivers emerge. The artwork titles explicitly reference symphonies, language and echoes, revealing an artist attentive not only to the physical presence of rivers and country, but also to their histories, rhythms and memories. In doing so, the exhibition encourages viewers to move beyond seeing the river as scenery or resource and instead encounter it as a living presence whose stories, memories and rhythms continue to shape both place and experience.

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A defining aspect of the exhibition is its multidisciplinary nature. Dorrough’s paintings sit alongside hand-built ceramic vessels and stitched textile works, each medium contributing to an evolving visual dialogue. The movement across these forms mirrors the interconnected networks of the natural world, where boundaries between systems remain porous and continually in flux. Dorrough’s ideas migrate between materials, with marks, symbols and gestures recurring across her surfaces.

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The artist’s process begins outdoors, often working plein air on riverbanks, where sticks, leaves and stones become both tools and sources of inspiration. These found materials leave traces within the work, grounding abstraction in direct experience and physical engagement with place. The resulting surfaces possess a layered quality, functioning as visual palimpsests in which memories, histories and sensations accumulate over time.

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Dorrough’s ceramic vessels, built through the ancient technique of coiling clay, carry embedded marks and richly layered glazes that evoke sediment and geological time. Similarly, her textile works are traversed by hand stitching that recalls river courses, pathways and ancient tracks across the land: the stitched line operates as both drawing and metaphor, suggesting acts of repair and renewal. In this sense, the textiles embody a philosophy of care, reflecting the attentive stewardship required to sustain river systems and ecosystems.

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The exhibition is also shaped by a deeply personal dimension. Dorrough describes working in the quiet hours before dawn, finding restoration and alignment while resolving paintings in her urban studio. Against the backdrop of environmental crisis, social distraction and uncertainty, her work offers a slower and more reflective mode of engagement.

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In Awakening Time, Kate Dorrough creates works that are both intimate and expansive. Through her unique poetic visual language, she delivers a direct ecological message, encouraging us to observe closely and reconnect with the memories and languages of the natural world. Her art is less about representing a river than about teaching us how to listen to one.

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Article

ARTIST PROFILE

Essay by Emma-Kate Wilson

Issue 75, May 2026, p 122 - 125

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‘A PALIMSEST APPROACH

The slow, conscious methodology of hand stitching, coiling large clay vessels and painterly, rhythmic mark-making defines Sydney-based artist Kate Dorrough's painting, ceramic and textile practice. Her painting style renders the landscape and connection to place in expressive gestures, with line and form working quickly across the surface. Her ceramic vessels mirror her sizeable canvases, with painted glaze on the clay. She uses the metaphor and physicality of the "river" as a theme in her multidisciplinary works— the river as a life giver, and her seasons of womanhood as mother and artist.

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Whether Dorrough is working on ceramics or textiles, she approaches them as painting. Working between mediums, the artworks speak to each other in a never-ending, expansive dialogue. Her hand-built stoneware ceramics involve an unorthodox approach of multiple firings and glaze applications, finding alchemy in the kiln. The textile stitches are layered between the front and back and reconstructed again and again, while her paintings depict stratified gestures of nature in abstracted landscape mark-making. They are experimental; the outcome is informed by the process' fluidity. In recent years, she has introduced theatrical elements of video, costumes and performance to

support the installations she presents in galleries.

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It was during her 2011 residency on the Murray River in Mildura that she began capturing the sense of the trees on the river in abstract shapes, as an expression and formulation of her own calligraphic language. This residency was followed by others at Manning Regional Art Gallery (Manning River), Wayout Artspace (Kandos), Cementa24 (Cudgegong River), The Corridor Project (Lachlan River), Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research Station (Broken Hill) and The Museum of Art and Culture, yapang (Lake Macquarie). Offering proximity to inland rivers, these experiences remind Dorrough of her childhood on her family's property near Wollombi in the Hunter Valley and adjacent bushland, swimming through the silty water, with its murky, mysterious shapes and patterns. Likewise, she finds inspiration in the accidental mark-making of trodden paths in the paddocks and animal tracks through native grasses. These marks become a set of symbols and patterns applied to the surfaces of paintings, ceramics and textiles. "I'm allowing for the accidental, the unknown," she shares.

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Textiles stirred the artist after creating works for the touring exhibition, Heather + Kate Dorrough: Lineage, 2023-24, at Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Manning Regional Art Gallery, Tamworth Regional Gallery and Ararat Gallery TAMA (Textile Art Museum Australia), in homage to her mother's textile practice. "Now, I'm using a lot of my mother's textiles in my works....There is a lovely echo that I'm conversing with my mum and expanding on the artistic and domestic female lineage." Here, the artist's practice comes full circle, from the concepts of the river as a life giver, to her relationship with her mother and to her own experience as a mother and a creator of art.

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Dorrough often works on her textile artworks and drawings for large paintings en plein air on the "riverbank." Working intuitively, she constructs these pieces on the ground and continues the stitching and painting on stretched linen back in her studio in Marrickville, Sydney, creating a unique construction that evokes the multiple times and places it was made. Dorrough describes the palimpsest effect in her works, the traces and linkages between each series of works and mediums, revealing layers of gesture and human connection. More recently, aspects of experimental play that comes with spending time with children feed into performance, videos and costumes made with the textiles created. For her site-specific installation Theatre of the Grotto, 2021, at The Cube in the Mosman Art Gallery, she presents her ancient river grotto, composed of five-channel video projections and sound, with hanging textiles acting as staged side wings, sculptural props, and ceramics for a fantastical and immersive layered construction of shells and rockery. "My work has always been informed by the historical, with references to the archaic, evoking a playful sense of the theatrical and the performative," says Dorrough.

Residencies and regional exhibitions offer Dorrough the chance to continue these experimentations. For the group exhibition A Kind of Resistance, 2025, at the University of Newcastle's, The University Gallery, she created a video artwork, River Stories, 2025, presented with River Installation, 2025, comprising her hanging textile works, paintings and ceramics. In the video, she interviews female regenerative farmers and Indigenous elders, allowing the viewer to hear their stories of the "river" and the life it gives, inspiring protection for future generations. Works emerging from her second residency with The Corridor Project in 2025 and the resulting group exhibition at Cowra Regional Art Gallery, LAND-Artists on the Land of Three Rivers, 2026, blended paintings and textiles with performance as the textiles became costumes.

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Dorrough's upcoming exhibition, Awakening Time, at Arthouse Gallery, Sydney in September continues her practice of ceramics, paintings and textiles as "a metaphor for awakening," expanding on the metaphor and ecological importance of the "river" as supplying life and holding secrets in the landscape. Using her calligraphic gestures, paintings such as Calligraphic Markings Of The Galari River, 2026, and ceramic vessels like Ancient Land And River Lines, invite active listening and observation through materiality. The artist hopes the exhibition can raise awareness of the ever-present threat of climate change and ecological concerns that are never far away in regional Australia. As she concludes, "The landscape is a language that resonates and is deeply embedded in the Australian psyche."

Exhibition: Awakening Time

15 September - 5 October

Arthouse Gallery, Sydney