Kate McKenzie Lewis: Ember

OPENING NIGHT FRIDAY 1 MAY 2026, 5:30 - 7pm

Bett Gallery is thrilled to present Kate McKenzie Lewis’s first solo exhibition at the gallery Ember.

This body of work comprises thirty paintings that respond to an ongoing concern with bushfire-affected landscapes. The works navigate dramatic scenes of destruction, horrific loss, and the uneasy beauty that can emerge in their aftermath. Central to this practice is an interest in light, how it reveals, deceives, distorts, and transforms our perception of the environment.

Australia is one of the most bushfire-prone countries in the world, shaped by a hot, dry climate, combustible landscapes, and human intervention. These conditions are increasingly intensified by climate change, resulting in fires of unprecedented scale and frequency. Fire exists here as both necessity and threat: a natural process and an unstoppable force.

Immersed in these landscapes, my vision softens and adjusts amid chaos, embers, debris, and absence. I observe how light fractures, blurs, and reflects across damaged terrain, offering moments of beauty within devastation. Painting becomes my primary language for holding these contradictions, built through gesture, colour, and repetition.

My practice explores landscape as a convergence of emotion, memory, and place, shifting between vast landforms and intimate, cellular structures. Growing up by the sea and among trees shaped my vivid yet unreliable memories of land, where movement, light, and shared experience continually distort perception. Working primarily in expressive oil painting, and incorporating recycled and found materials, I approach landscape as both personal history and ecological responsibility.

These works sit between grief and hope. They reflect a deep sense of connection, care, and unresolved belonging, and invite viewers to feel both the fragility of the land and a desire to protect it.

Sydney born, Melbourne based, artist Kate McKenzie Lewis’ work is steeped in the Australian landscape. Painting and the bush have been two constants in Kate’s life. Time spent in Booderee Country (Jervis Bay), Gadubanud lands in the Victorian Otways and Boon Wurrung/ Bunurong Country on the Victorian Peninsula, has given Kate the opportunity to examine the visual intersection of place, process and paint.

After graduating with a Masters in Contemporary Art from the VCA in 2022, Kate continued her exploration of the bush and coast; walking, camping, running and of course painting. Painting smaller ‘en plein air’ works, as well as larger ‘alla prima’ (in one sitting) pieces back in her Melbourne studio - forever blurring lines between fiction and reality.

Painting in collaboration with her environment, Lewis paints her landscapes on sheets of scrap metal and recycled materials found local to the places she is compelled to examine. Her adventures in bush and on the coast, traversing the trails and hunting/scavenging trips to the local tip inform her subsequent time in the studio. Adding, then subtracting her paint to reveal the metal beneath. Translating the harsh beauty of the discarded foreign material to contrast with the organic oily forms of the natural world as she sees it.  Lewis’ manipulation of perspective, light, colour and scale, piques the viewer's curiosity creating an oscillation between imagined moments and real memory. Kate's work is transportive; the country she depicts both stirs and subverts the viewer's memory.

Drawn to the oil-laden Australian landscape and entangled within her eucalypts, Kate grapples with the complicated tension of the land. Kate feels that in this country our landscape is full of contradictions, vast beauty, deep loss and it is this environmental tension that she wants to explore in her painting practice.  She hopes her work can reveal some of her personal sense of love, loss and foreignness to a place.

Lewis is a 2022 Hadley’s Landscape Art Prize, a 2024 Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, Museum of South Australia, a 2024 Len Fox Painting Award, Castlemaine Art Museum, a 2024 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, a 2025 Milburn Art Prize for Landscape Finalist and winner of the Shepparton Art Museum Urbach Landscape Prize in 2026.