Kate Coyne

27 March - 30 April      Calm before the storm 

More about the artist

Kate Coyne is currently enrolled in the Master of Arts program at the National Art School in Darlinghurst. It is but a step in an education that began decades ago at the Sydney College of the Arts where she was as a graphic arts student. Along the way she mentioned a trip to New York where she came across an exhibition by Robert Morris that introduced her to the possibilities of art.

Robert Morris is one of the luminaries of the New York School of Modernism. A group of artists collectively described as “Minimalist” working in the U.S.A. at the moment of its ascendancy during the mid-20th century. The shared idea behind their often geometrically spare art lay in the rigorous beauty of works that approached a kind of spiritualism devoid of religiosity. These artists dealt in facts not illusions. The material of their art was nothing more than that  - their pictures told no story, they simply existed.

In that context Kate Coyne presents an installation of apparently organic forms of similar proportions clustered across the wall leaving deep troughs  between the elements of the work that some how seem more appealing than the elements them selves. Hooded and overlapping there is a sensuality in these forms that leads us away from the “minimalist” ideal - because these organic forms throw up associations with a natural world that exist out side the art object.

To my eye this work revels in those natural associations that are best perceived at close range. I find it appealing to be enveloped in these forms and the sensuality they imply. In that sense this is a work to be read rather than conceived of as a whole. It is a sum of parts that we might experience as we pass by its elusive presence. 

This work exists in the present - a present of imminent climatic upheaval. A moment when the by-products of our quest for a material nirvana threaten the natural order that made such a quest possible. Unlike Robert Morris, Kate Coyne is living through the fading hegemony of the U.S.A where the ideals of the material aesthete have 

been replaced by a kind of lament, from the academic poetics of post modernism to Donald Trump’s feeble call to “make America great again”. In this context Kate Coyne’s white on white construction of sheeting stretched across wire frames seems, decedent. Because it hints at an organic order devoid of the apparently doomed human construct, materialism?Tony Twigg