Kate McKenzie Lewis: Ember

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

Kate is featured in the current Australian Art Collector Magazine  May - June  in the Artist's to look out for round up for 2026.

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This body of work is a personal and emotional study of bushfire-affected landscapes. Illustrating moments suspended between destruction and regeneration, where the land exists in a state of both loss and transformation. Through these paintings, I explore the complex connections between natural processes, human impact, and the ways we perceive, remember, and remain connected to place.

Central to the work is an investigation of light, how it reveals, distorts, and reconfigures what we see. Moving through my landscape, my vision softens amid haze, fog and embers. Light fractures across the surface, creating fleeting moments of beauty within the ecological evolution. 

The works draw on a combination of lived memory, observation, and research. I reference personal experiences of smoke-filled skies, road closures, foggy horizons and the warm, foreboding glow of sun and moon during firey summers, alongside drawings made from bushfire-affected landscapes. These are interwoven with found imagery and material gathered from media coverage, environmental reports, and ongoing research, bringing together intimate and collective experiences of fire.

Fire is a crucial part of Australia’s ecological and climatic systems. This duality is reflected at the core of the work: a belief in cycles of burning and renewal, and in the land’s capacity for regeneration.

Through gestural mark-making, dry brushing, and a conscious restraint in paint application, attempting to say more with less. The surfaces are built through movement and emotional response, allowing moments to remain in flux as is our landscape. This approach mirrors the instability of memory and the shifting nature of the landscape itself.

The compositions move between vast terrains and intimate windows through time, suggesting a connection between environmental processes and internal states of feeling. Through gesture and colour, I hold these contradictions, grief and beauty, damage and renewal, while allowing space for recovery to emerge as an ‘ember’ of hope.

These paintings offer moments of fragile yet enduring connection, inviting viewers to reflect on their relationship with the environment, and to consider both the responsibility and possibility inherent in its care.

- Kate Mckenzie Lewis, 2026

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.