Multidisciplinary artist whose works explore ecological fragility and climate change.
Creative focus areas:
Digital media, Visual arts
Open to:
Collaboration, Commissions, Exhibitions, Work for sale
Website / Socials
Primary location:
Bega Valley Shire
Headshot of artist, supplied by artist
Katherine Boland is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Merimbula on the Far South Coast of New South Wales. Her practice spans photography, digital media, moving image, and experimental processes — work rooted in direct, sustained engagement with the Australian landscape and the ecological forces reshaping it.
The Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20, which devastated her region, were a turning point. Fire was no longer abstract or symbolic — it was immediate, visceral, and permanent. Since then her work has become inseparable from questions of ecological fragility, climate change, and what it means for art to act as both witness and response. She photographs the landscape over years and across seasons — rivers, coastlines, forests, burnt country — building an intimate archive of a place under increasing pressure. From this material she constructs images that sit between documentation and transformation: the landscape as it is, and as it is becoming.
Technology is a quiet thread throughout. She combines her own photography with digitally generated imagery to create work that inhabits the boundary between the natural and the synthetic — reflecting a world where ecological disruption and human intervention are no longer separable.
Katherine's work has been featured at five consecutive United Nations Climate Conferences, and in 2023 her work Fire Flower No. 8 — created using fire itself — was presented by the Australian Prime Minister as an official gift to President Biden at the White House. She has received major Australian art prizes including the 2023 National Capital Art Prize (Sustainability Category), the 2023 Burrinja Climate Change Biennale Art Award, and the 2009 Heysen Prize for Interpretation of Place. Her work is held in collections across Australia, the United States, Asia, and Europe.