Kim Westcott

After graduating in 1989 from the Victorian College of the Arts, Kim Westcott, then just 21, gravitated to the Australian Print Workshop (APW). By 1991 its Director, Neil Leveson, had offered her a position as his assistant.

A trip to Dimboola and the Little Desert region of Victoria in 1992 was the first time Westcott had taken her working materials out into the countryside. The freedom she experienced opened up new horizons and enhanced her perceptions of the Australian landscape.

After the death of Neil Leveson, the void at the APW was temporarily filled in 1993 by the American Master Printmaker, Garner Tullis.

He announced that '[the] shop is the most professional that I have run into in the last 20 years and this is really due to the two young printmakers' - of whom Westcott was one. She was invited to join Tullis at his New York workshop in 1993. Following a second visit in 1994, she accepted an offer to work as his Master Printer.

Westcott's desire to work with the Australian landscape prompted her return after a year in New York.

She first travelled to Utopia in Central Australia, where she worked alongside and assisted Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Back in Melbourne she took a cottage near Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula, and in 1997 she set up her own printing studio near the city. Living at Sorrento gave Westcott a new landscape to explore: 'the tea-trees and she-oaks are affected by the harsh climatic conditions of the coastal environment, so you have these wild eccentric, twisted tree forms.