About Kate French

For the past twenty years I have lived on Tamborine Mountain, in the South East Queensland Hinterland, Australia, with its beautiful, mossy rainforests, avocado orchards, views of the ocean and its broad, breathtaking skies. Here I have raised my family, planted two foolishly dreamy gardens, collected a kaleidoscope of friends and old yellow jugs, and slowly, incrementally, I have become an artist.

The wonderful and varied characters who have come from all over the country and the world to make this place their home have been a perpetual source of inspiration. They have fuelled my fascination with people. Human emotions and quirks of personality, the huge diversity in our physical characteristics and, in particular, the way the human face can both mask and expose the story which lies beneath, are the things I seek to capture. The face is a marvel of nature.

The first medium I was drawn to was clay ceramics, focusing on figurative and portrait sculpture. Over the years, the older female has become the main subject of my sculptural practice. I love to tell a story about these archetypal characters who birth themselves in my studio. These works, inevitably, are not beautiful, in the traditional sense, but all of them celebrate what it means to be human, to be alive. The figurative sculpture you see on this website is largely a result of the quest for true beauty in our perfection hungry imperfect world. Please go to the Sculpture page.

Sculpture is not the only medium through which I communicate my ideas. There are times when the paintbrush holds me captive. The landscape, the skyscape and the rocky skin between the land and the sea, become contemporary, abstract paintings of the emotion that I feel in these places; they are landscape dreams, usually painted on a large scale.

Another recurring theme in my paintings are the unloved, unnoticed, utilitarian surfaces of doors, walls and pathways. Their glorious scarred surfaces, peeling colours, blunt dents, their lacerations and their oily fingerprints tenuously covered with paint are like a veil between different eras and lives. I aim to capture the energy of what happens so accidentally in the real world, onto canvas. Visit the Paintings page.

I also specialize in traditional portrait bust sculptures, in both ceramic clay and cast bronze. Many of these works have been commissioned for corporate offices, and for individuals’ homes. For more information please go to the Commissions page.

Each year I travel nationally and internationally to teach the “Kate French Method” of ceramic clay portrait sculpture. Find more information on the Tuition and Workshops page, and check the list of upcoming workshops to see if there is one that would suit you.