Katrina’s artistic career evolved from living and creating art in a small country railway village, to gaining a Fine Art Masters in the UK, including numerous exhibitions, in the UK, USA, Namibia and Australia. Her work is formed through dreams, beliefs, desire to rework and re-form, investigating the depictions of surface; expressing emotion through art and different forms, allowing these emotions to transform into, physical, visual and aural.

Katrina was shortlisted in 2011 for the Aesthetica Creative Works Art Award for Car, a small remnant of her major instillation Appelplatz centred on the events of the Holocaust and in particular, the experience of women and children as victims of those atrocities. Having built a strong history of exhibitions throughout England, on returning home to South Australia, Katrina was chosen to represent Australia in the 2015 Namibian Tulipamwe, through which her work The Color of Language emerged, exploring languages through art; an investigation into the experiences of expressing language in matter through the use of voice prints.

As a conceptual artist Katrina gets excited at the prospects of creating and expanding work to a whole new avenue of artistic expression, which saw her Colour of Language work translated into felt during the 2016/2017 international Margin to Margin project, and the 2017 Voices exhibition in Port Augusta, at the Yarta Purtli Gallery.  The work as a whole, produces a visual dialect of response to travels, people, environments encountered; decoding of the idea, the process, the work, the meaning of expression. Current proposed work, Remembering Rachel is a continuance of the discussion, particularly around Katrina’s own identity and vulnerabilities in life, self-reflection on the essence of being, personal losses, informed by the remembrance of childhood gone, imprints of life and essence through textile and visual.

Being on the peripheral of society growing up in a small railway village separated by distance from the closest small town, being free to travel extensively throughout Australia, Europe and America in her middle years, together with her own infertility, Katrina has now found herself again living on the peripheral of society in her senior years, in a small country town, hours from larger cities, reflecting on her role reversal as carer for her elderly mother – once the child/parent relationship, now the adult/child relationship.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Jerimiah 31:15

By Katrina Vivian (2019)