Kate Valentine
About the artist
Kate Valentine is a painter and printmaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, now living and working on Gayamaygal Country near Manly, NSW.
Valentine makes paintings and drawings of the native and introduced flora of her local area as sustained meditations on place, growth, time and impermanence. Her works imagine lush environments through intricate, densely layered compositions, stretching botanical forms and flattening pictorial space to draw detail forward into the viewer’s plane. The resulting images balance precision and abundance, inviting close looking while evoking immersive, dreamlike spaces.
A second line of enquiry into time and impermanence is through portraiture, capturing the fearlessness and direct presence of children, and the ever changing experience of motherhood.
Trained as a printmaker, drawing and composition are central to Valentine’s approach. Her current bodies of work engage with the visual and spatial language of Japanese printmaking and painting and 1990s–2000s Neopop aesthetics.
Before returning to full-time studio practice, Valentine held professional roles in libraries and cultural institutions, information policy, and product management, informing a creative practice shaped by scholarly research and systems thinking.
Valentine studied printmaking and art history at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, graduating with a BFA in Printmaking and a BA in Art History from the University of Auckland and the University of Edinburgh, where she received the Printmaking Prize. She also holds a Master of Information Studies with Distinction from Victoria University of Wellington, supported by a Victoria Graduate Scholarship and awarded the Rosemary Smith-Horton Prize for Digital Technologies.
Kate Valentine is represented by McCarthy Gallery, Australia.
