Bergin frequently uses folds to create tensions and diptyches to resist completeness. Her larger still life, a diptych, is strewn with spoons struggling in disorder. The cloth about them is like engulfing waves. The lack of photographic precision makes one imagine this is a dream world where the most trivial object is treated with magic memories.

Elwyn Lynn, The Australian, 1993

Mark’s grid compositions are luminously beautiful, each final composite canvas more than the sum of its parts.

Sandra Hodgson, Flying Gazette, 1998

Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in the early nineties, Kate Bergin and Mark Stewart have been painting and exhibiting for more than 17 years.

They live with their two sons in an 1865 church in central Victoria. This setting while providing beautiful space and light also reflects both artists’ layered references within their work.

Mark’s paintings present a romantic and ethereal notion of landscape and still life while Kate uses direct references to the old masters.

Kate and Mark have gained much inspiration from their travels in Europe over the years and in 1997 Kate received an Australia Council Overseas Residency to Italy. This was of particular importance as it allowed for a four month study of galleries which has continued to feed into Kate’s paintings over the last decade.

They also lived north of Cairns for five years where Mark’s paintings developed an intensity of colour and saw his work gridded into squares as a way of depicting many images coming together simultaneously. The culmination of this time was a painting selected for Winsor and Newton’s Millennium Art Prize exhibited at the United Nations in New York.

Kate’s time in Cairns saw the discovery of butterfly and insect collections from Tinaroo and Cooktown making their way into her paintings which have now developed, through the resources of the Melbourne Museum and excellent taxidermists from Australia and the US,  into birds and more recently animals, beginning with her fox. See Kate's News page for her latest acquistion.