Without A Drop Of Rain

Cate Maddy is a Melbourne based artist living and working on Wurundjeri Country. She was born on an Australian airforce base on Penang and now lives with her two Italian greyhounds and a cat in Melbourne Australia.

Her practice is grounded in deep connection to the Australian bushland that surrounds her home—an ever-evolving source of inspiration that shapes both the emotional and conceptual core of her work.

Holding a Bachelor of Fine Art from RMIT University, Cate has exhibited extensively across Australia and her work can be found in collections here including Artbank Sydney and internationally. She has been a finalist in many Art Awards the most recent being The Waverley Art Prize in Sydney and the Omnia Prize in 2025. She has studied in Venice Italy and worked en plein air in the outback at Fowlers Gap last year.

Her mixed media paintings explore the intersection between the material and the metaphysical, using colour and texture as tools for deeper inquiry. Drawing on principles of colour psychology, her work invites intuitive, sensory responses from viewers, while engaging with expansive themes such as identity, time, memory and perception.

Cate's process is both instinctive and deliberate. She builds her surfaces through gestural mark-making, layering pigments and materials in a way that suggests both movement and stillness—moments suspended in space. Her approach embraces abstraction as a way of articulating what cannot be easily seen or said: a way of being in the work that is felt more than understood.

With each painting, Cate aims to create a space of contemplation—an encounter with nature not just as a visual subject, but as a lived and felt presence. Her paintings offer portals into something larger, reflecting the quiet, complex relationships we hold with place, self and the unseen.