"Little Fourteen-year-old Dancer" after Degas

My name is Kerry Inkster and I am an artist and yoga teacher living in the remote tropical city of Darwin, in the Northern Territory, Australia. The world of women swimming underwater features strongly in my work. My paintings explore the female figure and face through poetic symbolism, paint itself, light, colour, and personal journal. I am particularly interested in capturing feelings and in the water’s ability to foster healing, transcendence, escapism, and sanctuary. My paintings have a distinctive, bright palette with saturated tones and contrasting light, and I work predominantly in acrylic on large-scale canvases. I use Notan principles, a term derived from the Japanese language, literally means “light-dark balance.” I find it to be an excellent tool for simplifying the composition of complex scenes and to see value instead of colour. This encourages my exploration of colour, employing Paul Gauguin’s synthetist style, where I aim to synthesise three features in my work; the outward appearance of natural forms; my feelings about my subject; and the purity of the aesthetic considerations of line, colour, and form. My process involves working on each painting individually, so each one is unique in form, colour, and emotion. My paintings tread boundaries between pop art and expressionism, realism and abstraction. I strive to articulate a felt sense in physical form. My mission is to uplift women – this is the engine that fires my entire practice.