—by Anna Snoekstra
Known for her maximalist and hyper-detailed artworks, Del Kathryn Barton joins the dots of her evolution into one of Australia’s top contemporary artists.
01 Del Kathryn Barton’s unique vision has transcended Australian boundaries to capture global attention. Image: Saskia Wilson.
02 Still from Barton’s film, The Nightingale and the the Rose, 2015. Image: Aquarius Films.
Del Kathryn Barton is tired, but that won’t stop her. She speaks to me from her Paddington studio, in Sydney’s leafy inner-east, her hair piled high and her outfit a magic eye of layered patterns. The space around Barton is overflowing with colour, paint splatter and empty easels. The huge paintings, drawings and sculptures themselves are gone. The day before, she had shipped an exhibition of new work to Korea, for her outing at Frieze Seoul with Melbourne’s Station Gallery—a deadline that came within a week of sending off work for a return show at Albertz Benda in New York titled the more than human world.
I’m instantly curious about the way she titles her works, always in lower case and often expansive. Barton tells me she chooses lower case because, in her words, “I want there to be a sense that there’s no real beginning and no real end. [The titles are] these poetic bubbles of text floating around the practice that can offer moments of potential connection or interpretation without it being fixed.” She resists the pressure on artists to offer direct explanations of their art, but offers: “The essence of my work, the female protagonists and the worlds that they inhabit are very heightened. There’s a strong sense of humanity, but it goes beyond the everyday.”
I ask Barton if she’s planning to take a break to recover after these big milestones, especially with a new book of her work being released with Station in coming weeks, but she gives me one of her signature explosive laughs. She’s just signed on for another show in Miami. For Barton, her art practice isn’t something she wants or needs a break from— it’s what gives her energy. “I’m not an artist who ever has creative blocks,” she explains. “If anything, there are just too many ideas and the constant desire to make. It’s about the challenge of grounding that [impulse] and not feeling overwhelmed. My brain and my sensory experience of being human are very, very fertile.”
Digging deeper into her practice, she says: “This fertile quality and my maximalist aesthetic, and experience of inhabiting a female form, is all very layered and dense and complex. I think, for me, bringing that down to a single image is enormously challenging, but it gives me a lot of calm as well,” she explains. “I love to think about the paintings as being like the centre of a spider web; a distilled moment that lots of different narrative and sensory experiences extend from.”
studio. Image: Saskia Wilson
We discuss this idea of distilled moments from which so much colour and story can expand, and I ask Barton if she can think of any such moments from her own life: moments that have transformed her as a woman and an artist. “I’m 52 now,” she says, “so you can look back, and you can join the dots, you know, to find coherence.
“Living it is just the big, messy experience of being human every day.”
The first moments that began her practice were incredibly difficult ones. As a child, Barton lived with her parents and two siblings in tents on a huge 20ha property in the lower Blue Mountains, surrounded by 200ha of forest. She experienced debilitating episodes of auditory and visual hallucinations. Her mother, a committed Christian and Steiner school teacher, went to a series of alternative healers to help her daughter. “No one really knew what was happening. My mother, in the end, when I was having an episode, just encouraged me to draw in those moments.”
Barton would feel disembodied during these episodes, but the act of drawing helped her become present. “It was a way of coming into my body and feeling safe, and just getting the energy moving through, and distracting the fear place of the mind with the act of creating something. That’s a life-giving space; a regenerative space; a space of joy and possibility. I use my practice in that way to this day, even though it’s a professional studio. I have staff, I have deadlines, blah, blah, blah. Still, it’s the life-giving force that drives my concerns.”
I ask her how this experience connected to the next significant moment of her creative evolution: art school. She admits the contrast was tough. “I left home when I was 17,” she says. “I was very innocent. I wasn’t streetwise at all. And I moved to [Sydney’s] Newtown, the inner city.” While the program exposed her to groundbreaking artists she deeply admired—including Joy Hester, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Watson and Sally Gabori—the institution’s conceptual emphasis clashed with her more intuitive, process-driven artistic nature. Beyond providing her with a framework for understanding her work’s place within the contemporary canon, art school’s most valuable lesson was profoundly personal. Barton discovered what she fundamentally needs for her practice: “A private space, a sense of sanctuary, a space where my body feels very safe. Where I can feel whatever I need to feel, because I have a lot of big emotions that I manage every day.” This revelation about the necessity of emotional and physical sanctuary became, as she puts it, “the biggest takeaway from art school.” The next turning point arrived when she was hanging drawings for a group show at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts, and the late legendary Sydney art dealer Ray Hughes walked in. Barton’s graphite drawings were emotional self-portraits, some quite graphic. Hughes bought one that night, and from there became her mentor. He understood who she was as an artist, and who she could be if she focused on figurative practice centring on lived experience. She credits his support with “changing everything,” transitioning her from studio practice to professional practice.
At this point in her career, Barton’s art was monochromatic and focused on drawing, but that changed with the birth of her son. “Our first pregnancy was unplanned. I was catapulted into the experience of a pregnant body, which I absolutely loved,” she enthuses. “The birth was long and protracted, but it was the birth I wanted, and that was incredibly meaningful to me. It was a whole different way of being in my body as a woman; it was so abject but so glorious.” Barton can vividly remember seeing her son, Kell, for the first time. “He’s got these amazing green eyes, and I had never felt more—bless my partner, I love him and we’re still together—but I had never felt more dizzyingly in love in my whole life. It’s a love that you don’t have to be afraid of, that’s just so pure, and the reciprocity is so deep, and the alchemy is so deep.” Barton returned quickly to her studio after recovering from the birth and began painting again, using colour for the first time in her professional life. “Look at my paintings now, [they’re like] rainbow kaleidoscopes. Kell was the beginning and the end of the rainbow for me all at once.”
hugo, 2013. Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Watercolour, gouache and acrylic on canvas,
200x180cm.
The birth of her son was followed two years later by the arrival of her daughter, Arella. She describes the experience of being a working artist with two young children as “[extraordinarily] challenging, but I was in my vibe.” Seeing her children experience the world fuelled her creativity, and her career soared. “Being a mother has made me a better artist,” she says, “and being an artist has mostly made me a better mother.” When her son was five and her daughter was three, Barton painted a self-portrait with them, which went on to win the 2008 Archibald Prize. Five years later, she won a second Archibald with her portrait of actor Hugo Weaving. Since then, Barton has solidified her position as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. She has held major solo exhibitions, including the highway is a disco at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2017, and participated in international art fairs such as UNTITLED Miami Beach, and Asia Now Paris in 2018. In 2015, Barton expanded her artistic practice into filmmaking with her directorial debut, The Nightingale and the Rose, which garnered multiple awards including the AACTA for Best Animated Short. She continued exploring moving image work with art film Red (2016), featuring Cate Blanchett, and her first feature film, Blaze, in 2022.
Although a spectacular and important piece of cinema, Blaze was an exhausting experience for Barton, its difficult subject matter tearing at old wounds. In February 2022, between finishing filming and the release of Blaze, Barton travelled to the Venice Biennale to visit the exhibition The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The show was filled with surrealist art made by women and non-binary artists that Barton admired, but whose work she hadn’t had the luxury to experience in person. It had a profound effect on her. “I feel emotional just going back to this memory,” she tells me. “I was wandering through this show, and I felt the most profound sense of connection—that this is the art canon I belong to. I haven’t felt that in Australia, or at least not in such a holistic, immersive way. It was confronting, in a way, to suddenly feel that I understood what my historical family was. That’s everything to me.”
However, Barton knows she couldn’t produce the work she makes if she were not Australian. “My works, more often than not, have that strong element of Australia which I’m passionate about, and that really defines space in a very particular way,” she says. It isn’t just her art that’s rooted to place, but her sense of sanctuary. “Even in the busiest parts of Australia, here in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, there’s still, for me, a feeling of tranquillity. A distilled quality. Australia just gives me the right energy to anchor my core self.”
“My works, more often than not, have that strong element of Australia which I’m passionate about, and that really defines space in a very particular way.”
Del Kathryn Barton’s the more than human world will be shown at Albertz Benda, New York from 30 October–30 December 2025.