Auckland-based artist Kate Woods works between the mediums of painting and photography, and is particularly interested in exploring the ‘non-site’: a mythical space that exists only in images, described by Woods as “places you will never physically arrive in, and yet seem so familiar”.

Her practice reworks found imagery, often of pictorial paintings or photographs of ‘classic New Zealand’ collected by the artist from junk shops. The familiarity of these images is undermined through the artist’s addition of strange prismatic forms, suggesting an alien presence or re-imagined portal to another place. These forms, cardboard constructions made by the artist, are placed on the ‘original’ found photos and re-photographed, creating a work ‘four stages removed from reality’: first the original photo, then a period of natural fading, followed by Woods’ additions, and her final photograph, creating a schism between this replicated world as indistinguishable from the real world.

Kate Woods (born 1981, Auckland) graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University in 2002, winning the Senior Painting Prize. Based in Wellington for many years, she worked at City Gallery Wellington as a registrar, and undertook the AsiaNZ Foundation’s artist residency to China in 2012. Woods has exhibited at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland; Adam Art Gallery Wellington, XYZ Collective, Tokyo, City Gallery Wellington and in Wellington City Council’s Mason’s Screen.