Mary Knott

Search terms: sculpture, bronze, wood, painting, landscape

About the Artist

Mary Knott arrived in Australia as a four year old in 1946 with her parents and sister on a converted troop ship. At 19, she embarked for Ceylon and India. After completing a year of sculpture study at Perth technical college in the early 1960s, she married her husband Bevan.

Knott works both as a sculptor and painter. Her versatile repertoire includes media such as bronze, bituminised paint, gesso and plaster. Her work is represented in major public collections, including the Office of Western Australia's Attorney-General and Minister for the Arts and Environment, the Commonwealth Law Courts and Federal Parliament House. In Bunbury, Western Australia, a large street sculpture of Knott's depicting the gateway to the port city's harbour stands in the busy main street.

Mary Knott endeavours to solicit an emotive response to her work and to reach people on a number of levels. Her process starts with a feeling, a remembering, occasionally a specific place. It is allowed to evolve into whatever or wherever it 'becomes'.

Hoping to leave channels open to a variety of these responses, she feels that the work is successful if it provokes thought or conveys an air of mystery. A sense of disquiet or unease might move the viewer to see things in a different light or present a new way of looking and feeling about a range of commonplace phenomena and sites. Using a subdued palette and distorted perspective she likes to refer to the process as personal myth making. When lucky enough to travel it helps her process although the work is never a factual record.

To read a review of Mary's group exhibition at the Gallows Gallery in 2002 please .