Kate Just

Kate Just is an American-born Australian artist known for her process-based and tactile art practice involving knitted sculpture, mixed media sculpture, collage, digital print, and video.

In earlier works, Just drew on myth and folklore linking women and nature to create elaborate, knitted figures and environments which metaphorically explored her own autobiographical experiences. These included a life-sized tree embedded with the faces and hands of her family, a woman descending into her backyard lawn, a corn field growing from a bed, and a woman transforming into a laurel bush. In each, the seemingly appealing, vivid scene also communicated themes such as loss, change and the physical and emotional mutability of women.

In more recent installations of mixed media sculpture and photo-collage works, Just mines archaeology, art history and symbology to present viewers with a range of archetypal tools, instruments and objects probing and revealing women’s ongoing link to the spaces of and around the body.

Kate Just holds a Bachelor of Science in Film Making from Boston University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, and a Master of Arts (Fine Arts) from RMIT University, Melbourne. She has exhibited her work across Australia at a range of public, artist run and commercial galleries including Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania. Internationally Just’s work has been exhibited at New Zealand Art Fair, IC Institute in New York City and will be featured in an upcoming solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.

Just has been shortlisted for numerous national prizes including the Beleura National Works on Paper Prize 2010, The Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, 2009, The Blake Prize, 2009 and the 2007 RIPE : Art& Australia Award. In 2006, Just was the winner of the Siemens Fine Art Prize. She was an artist in residence at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne 2007, and at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces from 2008 – 2009. In 2011 and 2012 she will undertake residencies at Krems AIR , in Krems Austria and at the Australia Council Studio in Barcelona. She has been a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne since 2005.

Kate Just is represented by Daine Singer