Anne Kay

Born 1958, Nasau, Bahamas

The art practice of Anne Kay is diverse and utilises a variety of means in response to different situations. Her materials are usually humble: often found, discarded objects unprepossessing in themselves, and the low–end technology of the slide projector. The conceptual processing which renders them art, is akin to the alchemist's secret of turning base metal into gold.

Invited to participate in Oblique – a site-specific art project based in the small town of Otira in the South Island of New Zealand, she took some Sculpee III modelling clay with her. Her Pocket Mountains were a response to the landscape encircling the town. Placed on an available car roof they marry with the ubiquitous tourist brochure image of the mirror-lake.

The urban environment is Kay's usual habitat and its issues her subject. After reading an evocative description from the early 1820s of a journey along Paramatta Road, now one of Sydney's most congested and 'dirty' thoroughfares then edged by a Turpentine Ironbark forest, Kay went in search of remnant bush preserved in a suburban parkland. In Picture Tree the image of a Blackbutt Gum, one of the trees she documented, appears on the screen of a plastic bag (now the endemic species of the area) as a luminous memory.

Making–do and allowing for happenstance, Kay's work is provisional by nature; its heroic/pathetic attitude (big themes/modest means) is what packs the punch.

Robyn McKenzie from her Samstag catalogue essay, Art and Research

2001 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
2001 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, USA 
1999 Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), University of Western Sydney - Nepean, Sydney 
1994 Bachelor of Visual Arts, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney 

Artist's website
http://www.annekay.net/