CATE MADDY

These paintings are translations of my readings and explorations of nature, of mapping its formations and abstracting what I feel to be the ‘essence’ of a particular moment. The work aims to create a dialogue between silences and spaces and the landscape of shapes and shadows to create a metaphorical language through colour and form which although derived from the natural world, hints at many different meanings. In the distillation of shapes we see figurative elements, but at the same time recognize a more universal emotional world of memory, death, love nurture and ecstasy.

My work looks at a world driven by contradictions where consumerism and environmental awareness compete and the presence of man seems impossible to evade.

Painting enables me to contemplate my complex environment, including natural and constructed, social, cultural and emotional in an expression of limitation and the limitless. Symbolizing our personal choices of what we include in our lives, our ability to exorcise the way we view life and our need for drama and exaggeration.

- Cate Maddy, 2009