Kate Just holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Sculpture) from Monash University, a Master of Arts from RMIT and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts where she has been a Lecturer in Art since 2005. Just has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across Australia as well as overseas in Auckland, New York and Vienna. Notable recent exhibitions include Just’s solo exhibition Venus Was Her Name at the Kunsthalle in Krems, a survey of Just’s major knitted works entitled Kate Just: The Knitted Work 2004 – 2011 at Ararat Regional Gallery, and her inclusion in the group exhibition Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2012.
Just’s PhD project, The Texture of Her Skin was developed in counterpoint to dominant visual representations that centre on women’s object-hood and suppression in their skin. Through a series of visual art works, Just explored the evocative and connective character of skin, and advanced its potential to visualise female embodiment and subjectivity. The archive of mostly sculptural ‘artefacts’ Just presented in her PhD exhibition was developed in New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Vienna, Krems and Melbourne, re ecting a sustained engagement with a diversity of cultural and visual histories of skin and the body. Comprising a series of surgical tools, archaeological relics, knitted second skins and armours, Just’s works question and recon gure surface accounts of the female body, reimagine history from a subjective position, and manifest skin’s capacity to sustain our most intimate connections. Studio processes including cutting, kneading, sewing, knitting, carving, tracing and reassembling were deployed to further augment and reweave skin as an active, porous network enfolding a sense of self and connection to the world. For this presentation Just will focus on a body of Just made in Barcelona exploring her mother daughter relationship with her adopted daughter Hope.
