WORK

Stones whisper stories from the past. Their language travels through touch, smell, sound and their embedded memories.

When cleaving or cutting stone, I’m never sure what I might find.  Fossils and knots of mica reveal themselves amidst iridescent streaks harbouring deep time secrets.  Their unique characteristics and narratives, be they geological or cultural, allow me to create layers of meaning in a work.  

ABOUT

Kate Butler is a mosaic artist, living and working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.  Kate works with a range of materials and is particularly drawn to rocks, which she has been collecting for as long as she can remember.  One of her strongest childhood memories from her ‘free range’, nomadic upbringing is of riding borrowed horses with a friend through the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia down to a local waterway to collect river stones.  

Her previous career as a social researcher which involved making meaning from thousands of pieces of data eased the transition to creating her own visual language and making meanings from thousands of tesserae (individual pieces of hand cut material).