Kim Anderson
Kim Anderson completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the University of Ballarat Arts Academy in 2003, and in 2017 was awarded a scholarship to study a Master of Fine Art at the University of Dundee in Scotland. She is now currently a Doctoral candidate at the National Art School in Sydney. Anderson has been awarded a number of residencies around the world including a Creative Australia Studio Residency at the British School at Rome, Australia House in Echigo-Tsumari, Japan, Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Scotland, and at Hill End and the Bundanon Trust in NSW. In 2016 she undertook a three-month residency at DRAWinternational in Caylus, France, which was supported by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, the Copyright Agency and Creative Partnerships Australia. In 2019 Anderson was the recipient of the Jon Schueler Scholarship, a three-month residency at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, National Centre for Gaelic Language, Culture and the Arts on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Exhibiting both around Australia and abroad, she has been a multiple-time finalist in numerous national awards including most recently the National Works on Paper (2026, 2020), Grace Cossington-Smith Award (2026, 2021), Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2025, 2024, 2021 & 2019 People’s Choice Award), Gosford Art Prize (2025), Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2024, 2022, 2020), the Paul Guest Award (2024, 2018, 2016), Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2023), Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2023, 2013), and the Muswellbrook Art Prize (2022) among others. In an expansion of her drawing practice, Anderson has also created a number of site-specific projects incorporating large-scale wall drawing, translucent suspended works, projection, poetry, and soundscapes. In 2024, in collaboration with sound artist Fukusan and set designers Form Imagination, she was commissioned to present The Lost Breath for White Night Ballarat, an immersive installation incorporating sound, visual art and kinetic sculpture. In 2021, Anderson was commissioned alongside poet Nathan Curnow and sound artist Rue Curnow to create new work in response to the Covid pandemic for Mutual Realities: Finding Common Ground in Uncertain Times at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. Additionally, she has presented site-specific installations in Scotland, France, Japan, Bathurst, Launceston and Hobart. ARTIST'S STATEMENT 'Through intricately detailed drawing I explore our complex relationship with the natural world, often using the landscape as metaphor for psychological unrest as we grapple with our place on this earth. My own recent experiences of human bereavement have overlapped with a wider sense of grief and anxiety associated with climate change and the loss of fragile ecosystems. Traversing an uneasy space between seeking solace in nature, while also confronting the horrifying reality of a natural world in crisis, the landscape reflects back at me the grief I feel as it undergoes its own multitude of losses. The ‘Fugue’ drawings are a physical, embodied manifestation of a troubled psyche in these tumultuous, uncertain times – a kind of “fugue state” attempting to disassociate from a news cycle constantly screaming of atrocities and crises, of bushfires, floods and mass extinctions, a climate on the brink of collapse, war and geopolitical instability, and a rising wave of fear and intolerance. The ‘Into Thin Air’ series is a quieter meditation on grief and the temporality of all things. The natural world is not so distant from our human dilemmas, with its cycles of life and death, destruction and transformation, and decay and renewal. Beauty and violence, and fragility and brutality coexist in nature as they do in the human world. An acute awareness of the peril the earth is facing only heightens my awe and astonishment as the light pierces through the trees and obliterates everything in its path. My drawing is an act of witnessing, validating and making sense of many contradictory feelings all at once – joy, fear, grief, love, terror, beauty and awe. Everything is in flux, nothing is fixed or final. Our existence on this planet is both sublimely beautiful, and fleetingly tragic.'
Artworks
14