Katie West facts for kids
Katie West is a talented artist from Western Australia. She creates amazing art using special dyed fabrics and plants found in nature. Her artworks are often like big, exciting experiences that use many of your senses, not just sight!
Growing Up
Katie West grew up on a farm in Western Australia, north of Perth. This area is known as Noongar country. Katie is also from the Yindjibarndi people, an Indigenous group from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Her connection to the land and her heritage is very important in her art.
How Katie Makes Art
Katie's art often features beautiful fabrics that she has dyed herself. She also uses native plants, which she sews or weaves into her pieces. Her art shows are often called installations. This means they are large artworks that fill a space, and you can often walk around them or even interact with them. They are "multi-sensory," meaning they might involve touch, smell, or sound, as well as sight.
Katie also likes to record how she makes her art. This process of documenting her work helps her tell stories. She often uses shapes or patterns, called motifs, like baskets or digging sticks. These shapes help her share ideas about how museums sometimes show old cultural items. She wants to show that culture is alive and always changing, not just something from the past.
Awards and Recognition
Katie West has received several awards for her unique art.
- In 2017, she won the Falls Creek Resort Indigenous Art Award.
- She also won the Dominik Mersch Gallery Award in 2017.
- In 2015, she was chosen to be part of the Kickstart program.
- She then showed her art at the Next Wave Festival in 2016.
- In 2023, one of her artworks, called Fence lines & Digging sticks, was chosen as a finalist for the important Ramsay Art Prize. This prize is held at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
