By Louise Tate
2023
oil on linen
36x28cm unframed
ARTIST STATEMENT
"This work continues a running theme of self-portraiture with found flowers. Women’s self-portraiture has deep roots in art history. Its popularity was in part due to the limitations on women’s art practices—such as an inability to enter the academy or access life drawing classes, or the burden of domestic duties and childcare—but also as a way to defiantly represent themselves beyond the male gaze. Alone in my studio, I continue this tradition of the small and intimate self-portrait. In this work I hold a peony and a strawflower, hiding my discomfort at being the subject of this work behind their plump and papery petals."
BIO
Louise Tate is an artist who lives and paints on Wurundjeri Country (Melbourne). In 2023 Louise won the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, and she has previously been a finalist in the Omnia Art Prize (2023), the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2021), the McClelland Splash Contemporary Watercolour Award (2021), the Hopper Prize (2020), the churchie national emerging art prize (2019), among many others. She has participated in artist residencies at Hôtel Sainte Valière in the south of France (2022), the NARS Foundation in New York (2019), and Kyneton in regional Victoria (2017), which was supported by the Macfarlane Fund. She has exhibited in Australia, the Netherlands, and the USA. Her work is held in the Bayside City Council Art and Heritage Collection, and in private collections in Australia, Singapore and the USA. Louise is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art (Research) at Monash University, for which she has been awarded a Research Training Program (RTP) Stipend.