Carmen Ky

Born in Cowra NSW, Carmen Ky studied at The National Art School Sydney during the 1960s and later at COFA UNSW with Earle Backen. She studied and practiced traditional Chinese Acupuncture during the 1970’s, keeping up a professional practice for nearly 10 years. Then in 1988 attended the School of Art, Canberra to study printmaking with Jorg Schmeisser. Carmen also studied traditional Indian drawing in Sikkim, India. For 17 years she taught part-time through TAFE, including EORA Institute for Aboriginal Studies and at the National Art School, while maintaining her painting practice and photographic projects on books and documentary films. Currently Carmen is a Higher Degree Research candidate at the School of Art, College of Art and Social Sciences at ANU. “My painting and printmaking is a contemplative practice engaged with the poetics of abstraction based on immersion in nature. This involves exploring the intersection between figuration and abstraction and taking landscape into abstraction. My research into the natural philosophy of the Five Elements as interpreted in Tibetan Buddhism and Indian tantric art opens a portal for connecting with conceptions of landscape central also to Australian indigenous culture. My practice embodies the interface of Eastern philosophy and Western art.” Carmen Ky has exhibited widely across Australia and is represented in public and corporate collections. Primarily a painter and printmaker, she has also exhibited in China and Malaysia and is known for her collaboration with Indian and Australian aboriginal artists and her photography in books and on documentary film. She now resides in Stanwell Park. NSW.