Kate’s Story

Kate Durham is a Melbourne artist, practising in jewellery, painting, decorative art, interiors, sculpture and drawing. She was trained in fine art in Melbourne.

Her work has been shown in Japan, England, the USA and around Australia. Kate has sold her designs in several boutiques and is currently sold in the National Gallery of Victoria’s design store. 

Kate is represented in major collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, The National Gallery, Canberra, Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Sydney Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston and Shepparton Regional Art Gallery, Victoria

In 2001, Kate established Spare Rooms for Refugees, a project to provide community accommodation for asylum seekers. In June 2002, she travelled to Nauru with a BBC journalist and thus provided the first images of Australia’s Pacific Solution.

Jewellery

In the 1980’s Kate made popular her extravagant, bejewelled jewellery, head-pieces, drawings, paintings, sculptures, busts, mirrors, frames and furniture. Kate’s choice of materials from scraps, remnants, and rubbish informed her playful and unique anti-fashion, fashion style. 

“My work is devoutly decorative and suspicious of the orthodoxies of ‘good design’ and its austerity, sobriety and minimalism. I believe these tendencies persist because of the work of envious men, who have for a couple of centuries been left out of the fun and love of the ‘shiny things’; the glittering stones, the dizzying transformations and the intricate and richly female world of fashion and jewellery.”