Kate Vella

Kate Vella is a painter whose work moves between still life and landscape, each anchored in a deeply felt sense of place. Based in the Southern Highlands, she began painting full time in 2018, developing a distinctive visual language in the years since. Largely self-taught and working predominantly in acrylic, Vella draws on the abundance of her surroundings, where her home and studio sit within a small village edged by farmland and the distant rise of the South Coast escarpment.

Her still-life paintings centre on the familiar pleasures of the domestic sphere: homegrown flowers, seasonal fruit, and much-loved crockery gathered into luminous, carefully composed arrangements. These works, including her recent solo exhibition ‘Radiance’, are characterised by their ebullience and warmth.

Alongside this, Vella’s landscape practice reflects a life lived in close proximity to the land. Raised on a family farm in Malta and now long settled in Robertson, her sensibility is shaped by both terrains. Her paintings often begin with what is near at hand—gardens, paddocks, winding paths, stands of trees—but are guided as much by feeling as by observation.

Since her first solo exhibition, ‘Antidote’ (Sydney, 2019), Vella has continued to exhibit widely and build a strong following among collectors in Australia and abroad. Her work has been recognised in a number of significant prizes, including selections as a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, the Kangaroo Valley Art Prize, and the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize (all 2020).

This month, Vella returns to Michael Reid Southern Highlands as part of ‘Placeheld’, a gathering of ten painters considering the many dimensions of landscape.