To The Moon and Back, 54-9. Painting

Kate McLeod is a full time mixed-media visual artist based in Ōtautahi, New Zealand. Kate’s current gestural, lyrical abstraction focuses on being attuned to the rhythms of life. Her work is imbued with a sense of immediate, fluid movement that invites an emotional response from her audience. Grounded by her deep fascination with colour, each work is a performance that captures a fleeting moment, a memory of a feeling. Following her graduation in 2005 from Canterbury University (BA, Art History and Sociology), Kate’s life twisted and turned, with jobs as a TV set designer, art teacher, advertising account manager, creative software executive and restoration project manager giving her licence to explore a wide range of creative disciplines. Along the way, Melbourne, Auckland, Ankara, London, San Francisco and Sydney have all been called home. Kate came full circle five years ago, putting down roots in her home town of Ōtautahi Christchurch, and set about creating the studio and environment to support her career as a full-time artist. The desire to mould and sculpt raw materials into something new started early. As a baby she took the only malleable, viscous substance she could get her hands on and painted her cot. Today she creates large scale paintings in oil and acrylic and makes assemblage from recycled found items. Copper and gold foil also feature heavily in her work along with other mixed media, nothing is out of bounds. Kate is on a mission to move one human at a time: “I hope you feel the physical performative energy of my movement as if you were there the moment it was created”.