Kate McLeod

Artist 

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Kate McLeod is a contemporary abstract painter based in Ilam, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has exhibited widely across Aotearoa, with work held in private and public collections in New Zealand, the USA, China, and the UK. In 2023, she represented New Zealand as a keynote speaker and exhibiting artist at the Liangzhou Forum, an international art symposium alongside artists from 86 nations.

 

Kate’s work is an evolving expression of lived experience, grounded in play, exploration, and a deep sense of freedom. Her practice embraces intuition and physicality, using oil, acrylic, resin, pigment, and metal leaf to build richly layered, gestural surfaces that hold both energy and stillness.

 

Each work emerges through a process of discovery. The techniques she retains are those that allow the painting to unfold naturally—balancing spontaneity with resolution to create pieces that resonate on both an emotional and sensory level. Her hand-built timber frames extend this relationship with material, reinforcing the artwork as a complete and immersive object.

Drawing on connections to place, memory, and the rhythms of the natural world—the movement of the moana, the pull of lunar cycles, the quiet passing of time—Kate’s paintings invite a personal response. They are spaces of openness, where meaning is not fixed but felt.

 

“My work is an invitation to feel, to pause, and to inhabit a moment. Each painting is a dialogue between material and energy, where gesture and colour create a space for presence and connection,” Kate McLeod.