Karlee Rawkins
“I look at my paintings very intensely, searching for clues to the next step. The composition shifts and moves, layers are added and removed. Then suddenly it will become apparent and I know what to do next. It is a strange, exciting and instinctual process that finally ‘catches’ a painting.”
Karlee Rawkins is known for her striking, symbol-rich paintings of wildlife and flora. Her work blends representational imagery with abstraction—emphasizing colour, pattern, and gesture over anatomical realism—to explore themes of vulnerability, resilience, and mythic transformation. Drawing inspiration from nature, folklore, medieval tapestries, Hindu-Buddhist aesthetics, and ritual symbolism, Rawkins develops layered compositions that feel both dreamlike and grounded in the natural world
Rawkins received her Bachelor of Visual Art with Honours from Southern Cross University in Lismore in 1999, and rose to national recognition when she won the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2003—gaining a residency in Paris and producing the award-winning painting Bitch in India inspired by her travels in India and Nepal. Since the mid‑1990s, she has exhibited widely in solo and group shows across Australia, including The Other Side of the Mountain (Flinders Lane Gallery, 2022) and True Blue (2025), and has earned accolades like the 2019 Margaret Olley Commendation at the Mosman Art Prize, along with repeated finalist status in awards such as Fishers Ghost, Prometheus, Clayton Utz, and KAAF.
