ABOUT
Kath Harding
Kath Harding is a Sydney-based visual artist, architect and multidisciplinary creative working across painting, installation, photography, moving image, writing and music. Her practice explores perception, psychological landscape, trauma, resilience and transformation through symbolism, narrative and material process.
With nearly three decades of creative practice, her work brings together visual storytelling across art, architecture, heritage, education and public culture.
THE PRACTICE
Where architecture asked how people inhabit space, my painting now asks how space inhabits us.
My background in architecture taught me that space is never neutral. Every threshold, passage and horizon shapes the way we move through the world, and the way the world settles within us. In my paintings, those ideas become symbolic landscapes where memory gathers in the terrain, architecture dissolves into atmosphere, and the visible world opens onto something quieter, stranger and more deeply felt.
Drawing on architecture and heritage, I explore how built and natural environments hold memory, emotion and change. These concerns move through painting, writing and moving image, transforming place into psychological landscape.
Landscape as a Living Presence
THE LANGUAGE OF THE WORK
Rivers, trees, coastlines, vessels, mirrors, birds, keys and doorways recur throughout my work. These elements are not illustrations or fixed symbols. They operate as fragments of an internal language, carrying memory, contradiction and emotional weight through imagined Australian landscapes.
Through surrealist imagery and imagined Australian environments, I approach landscape not as scenery, but as a living presence. It becomes a place of passage, return and renewal, carrying what cannot always be spoken directly.
THE EXPERIENCE
Invitation to Slow Looking
My work considers how change reshapes identity, memory and our relationship with place. Rather than offering a single meaning, each painting creates a space in which viewers can look slowly, recognise their own associations and encounter what may exist beyond the immediately visible.
My paintings are drawn to the beautiful and unsettling process of change: the ways people, places and identities are broken open, reformed and made new. Rather than resolving these experiences, the work leaves space for viewers to bring their own memories, thresholds and internal landscapes.
CURRENT PROJECT
The Silent Revolt
The Silent Revolt is an evolving body of symbolic Australian landscapes exploring memory, transformation and the quiet ways a person continues without being defined by what has happened before. Working across painting, writing and moving image, the project unfolds as a connected exploration of psychological and physical landscape.
Each work stands on its own while contributing to a larger narrative. Rather than illustrating a single story, the series builds a symbolic world where recurring forms, places and motifs gather meaning over time.
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE
Beyond the Studio
I studied fine arts before moving into architecture, drawn to the possibility of shaping environments that could affect people's daily lives. Through architecture, I developed an interest in sustainability that gradually expanded into cultural sustainability, heritage and the relationship between people, place and memory.
I drew as a child, worked in theatre through my school years, and began painting and photography in my twenties. Design, architecture and heritage followed, each adding another way of understanding space, culture and human experience.
