Kate Derum 1943–2008

Kate Derum’s art practice includes drawing, assemblage, collage, printmaking and painting, but she is best known for her woven tapestries where the fast pace and cluttered spaces of urban life are rendered on a woven surface both subtle and intense.

Kate held a number of solo exhibitions, principally at Gallery 101 in Melbourne. Kate travelled widely; her work was exhibited in Montreal, Lodz, Budapest, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Wellington, Oregon, Quebec, Yokohama, Paris and London.

Kate's long involvement with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop began in 1988 when she coordinated the International Tapestry Symposium held in Melbourne. She went on to become Workshop Manager and was Acting Director for several months.

In 1997 Kate completed a Masters of Fine Arts at Monash University. She subsequently spent eleven years as the head of the Tapestry Studio at Monash. In this role that Kate was able to introduce a new generation of talented young artists to the ancient tradition of tapestry.

In the late nineties Kate edited the International Tapestry Journal which she then transformed into the International Tapestry Yearbook of 2004.

Kate Derum’s tapestries are represented in significant corporate, public and private collections throughout Australia including Parliament House, Canberra; CSIRO Petroleum, Perth; BHP Billiton; Ararat Regional Gallery and the Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria.

The archive of Kate’s extraordinary oeuvre is a record of her observations, reflections and the passing of time. In her work Kate Derum creates an intersection between worlds - ancient and contemporary, low and high tech, fast and slow, rural and urban - that allows us to consider what lies within these dualities.