A layered journey through shifting landscapes: Kate Websdale and Julie Barker
Explore the Cooloola Coast’s natural environment, through the eyes of the artists.
Kate Websdale and Jule Barker can often be found creating, sketching and exploring mark making along the shoreline, interpreting a combined interest in the interrelated space within their environment; shorelines, the Wallum and the complex eco systems evolving along the Cooloola Coast.
Kate and Julie aim to capture and tell the story of this environment, which they treasure deeply. You’ll see that they each harness a layering technique, blending together multiple natural facets expressed through their unique and individual life lenses.
Image: 'Eco 1', multi media, Julie Barker
About the Artists
Kate Websdale has always been excited by the arts and creativity, and for the past 25 years life has allowed her more time to explore this interest. Kate has learnt a lot from attending courses and engaging with people who share her passions, being art and nature. It has been an exciting journey that she has embraced with enthusiasm. Her introduction to printmaking was at Gatakers Artspace and this has been a major component of her newer work.
Her journey from watercolour and its natural nuances to acrylic paints and then to printmaking has been a jagged and exploitive path as Kate has a strong desire to create authentic and personally expressive art pieces.
Kate enjoys the natural and delicate beauty of the Wallum bush and the rich coastline in the Cooloola area where she lives. She also spends time sailing in and around the southeast coastal shorelines. While in nature she has her drawing and painting materials at hand and attempts to unravel and express the layers of natural essences that coexist and thrive in nature’s complex harmonies.
An ongoing search to express the ever-changing landscapes and utilise varied materials to express the complex systems is the process that drives her art works. Her works are often multi layered and include water-based mediums, hand printed collage, studies created by both relief and intaglio printing methods, and impressions taken from recycled and found materials.
Julie-ann Barker is a mixed-media artist based on the Cooloola Coast; her work explores and shares the layered stories of her surrounding natural environment, drawing attention to the fragile beauty and complex relationships within her ecosystem.
Through the layering of colour and shapes she seeks to give voice to the unseen narratives and fragile connections of her local landscape, those subtle exchanges along the foreshores between land and water that often go unnoticed. Her work is both an act of observation and storytelling, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and rediscover their own connections to the environment around them. She is drawn to the rhythms and patterns found in nature and will often use stencils and symbolic oval shapes to explore her personal relationship with land and water. Through her practice, she invites viewers to rediscover their own connections to the natural world.
Julie is a graduate of Sydney College of the Arts, with a Bachelor of Visual Arts degree. She has explored many art mediums including oils, inks, photography, drawing, print making and ceramics, however acrylic painting and mixed media holds her current interest.
Exhibition Opening
''A layered journey through shifting landscapes' will be officially opened on Friday, 9 January 2026 at 6pm.
This is a free event and open to the public.
Come and meet the artists, explore their personal experiences and enjoy a drink from our licensed bar.