About Kylie As An Artist

Kylie is an Australian ceramic artist and transpersonal art therapist based in the Hawkesbury region of NSW.

Her ceramic practice brings together a long fascination with clay, symbolism, imagination, folklore and the unconscious. Rather than beginning with detailed drawings or predetermined characters, Kylie works intuitively, allowing each piece to develop through the process of making. A face will often emerge first. From there, she responds to the character that seems to be forming — its expression, posture, body, surface, markings and the objects or other beings it may carry.

Her background in transpersonal art therapy, including Jungian approaches to imagery and the unconscious, has deeply influenced this way of working. In both art making and art therapy, an image does not always need to be understood before it can be meaningful. Sometimes the image arrives first.

The work sits somewhere between sculpture, creature, artefact and imagined archaeological find.

Artist Statement

I rarely know exactly what I am making when I begin. I might start with a lump of clay and make a face. At some point the face begins to feel like somebody rather than something I have constructed. That is usually where the conversation starts.

What sort of body does this face belong to? Does it stand, sit, crawl or roll? Is it carrying something? Does it need another creature on its back? What has it experienced? What marks belong on its skin?

I try not to answer those questions intellectually. I continue making and pay attention to what feels right.

My background in transpersonal art therapy and Jungian approaches to image-making has helped me understand why I am drawn to working this way. I am interested in what can emerge when we stop trying to control an image long enough for something unexpected to appear. Symbols, repeated marks, strange fragments of language, animals, wheels, costumes and objects often find their way into the work. Sometimes I understand their significance. Sometimes I don't. I like leaving some of that uncertainty intact. For me, a symbol becomes less interesting when it can be reduced to a single explanation. I am more interested in the feeling that something has meaning even when we cannot quite name what that meaning is.

So I don't think of these beings as illustrations of ideas.

I meet them through making.

Their personalities, histories and strange little mythologies reveal themselves gradually — and occasionally I suspect they know considerably more about themselves than I do.

EXHIBITIONS

2025 Exhibition Hawkesbury Now - Hawkesbury Regional Art Gallery

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