Kate Woods was born in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland, NZ) in 1981 and is based there. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University (2002). Kate has exhibited widely in artist run spaces, dealer and public galleries including: Le Lieu Unique: Centre for Contemporary Culture, Nantes, France ; XYZ Collective, Tokyo ; Canterbury Museum ; City Gallery Wellington and Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Through her constructed photography and video works Kate Woods creates imaginary landscapes or alternate worlds. In past work she investigated the documentary photography of 60s and 70s Land Art in the way some of the images tend to give the sense of a non-space, or at least a space that can never be physically accessed, as it may not exist anymore. Places you will never arrive in yet seem familiar.
In the 2021 series Sites & Settings Woods continued her interest in the art history of the last century related to landscape and the documentation of the ephemeral. This time in terms of how artists, over various movements within the 20th century, related to their local or imagined natural environments. Woods generally uses appropriated imagery as backgrounds. However, for Sites and Settings, inspired by her connection to the bushwalk near her home, she included firsthand photographic components of Waitītiko Creek. She digitally pieces together found and firsthand photographic images and painted cardboard assemblages within her photographs “highlighting and re- contextualising particular events and key moments from cultural and art historical discourse”.*
Awards and Residencies
Recipient of Asia: NZ foundation artist residency at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, China, 2012.
Elam School of Fine Arts, Senior Painting Prize, 2002.
Winner of the Young Mt Eden Artists Awards overall prize and photography prize, judged by Allan Smith, 2000.
* from Water Feature, Rear Window Project 2018, Dunedin Public Art Gallery. https://dunedin.art.museum/exhibitions/past/kate-woods/
