Katherine Hattam

Art and creativity run in Katherine Hattam’s blood. The daughter of an artist, she is also the mother of artists, and has been making and exhibiting since the late 1970s. Art and life go hand in hand in Katherine’s work, which reflects her experiences and perspectives in a way that mirrors our own. Her work also incorporates text to emphasise her meaning. Widely exhibited and collected, Katherine’s work is represented in the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Art Gallery of South Australia, to name just a few.

GETTING TO KNOW KATHERINE HATTAM:

FAVOURITE HISTORIC ARTIST: Philip Guston and Louise Bourgeois.

FAVOURITE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST: Rose Wylie is the contemporary artist who most interests me. I like her risk taking and the fact that her paintings are often funny but not light weight. The huge painting called Breakfast for example, of a fried egg on her favourite breakfast plate.

FAVOURITE ART MUSEUM: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Whenever I go to see my sister Victoria, who lives in Brooklyn, I revisit the MET and still, I’ve hardly touched the sides. Australian artists are starved for these sorts of collections.

LIFE-CHANGING CAREER MOMENT: Maybe the life-changing moment in my career is yet to come. Perhaps not though, because 2023 is not bad so far. I have had works of mine hanging in the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

STUDIO SOUNDTRACK: Audible: 50 hours of the great biography of Lucian Freud, or opera, human voice or Radio National, until I’m driven mad by repeats.

PETS: Melba the cat and Vala, my daughter Harriet Morgan’s Alsatian, who has a beautiful temperament and is very well trained.

FAVOURITE CITY: New York as it is manageable, yet endlessly rich and my sister and her family live there. A great place to see art.

IF I WASN’T AN ARTIST… : If I had not dropped maths in Year 10 I would have done medicine and trained as a psychoanalyst like my sister Francis. But more realistically, a writer; instead, I married one, Jim Morgan.

FAVOURITE BEACH: My favourite beach for 20 years has been Port Fairy’s South Beach. This summer I discovered Santa Casa at Queenscliff, where ships appear, and you look through the heads on the horizon.