Statement
2020 marked the 250th anniversary of the Endeavour voyage along the East Coast of this continent, beginning at Tolywiarar on April 20th 1770. Across the globe monuments to Captain James Cook are plenty and yet the objective truth that these monuments claim to memorialise is non-existent. The monuments commemorate a claiming of space and place that ignores the unceded sovereignty of First Nations people while centring settler colonial history.
Kate Golding is a settler Australian of English ancestry based on unceded Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Victoria. She is a mother artist, educator and researcher. Golding completed a Master of Fine Arts in 2018 at the Victorian College of the Arts where her research focussed on critiquing the memorialisation of Captain Cook.
Golding has exhibited both nationally and internationally. She was awarded an ArtStart Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts in 2011. Her Aboriginalities project features in the Melbourne Museum’s permanent exhibition, First Peoples at the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre. She attended the Magnum Photos workshop with Raghu Rai at the 2013 Delhi Photo Festival. In 2015 she released her self-published photobook, Within You Without You. Golding has been a finalist in several photographic awards, and was the overall winner of the 2016 Linden Postcard Prize and the 2016 CCP Salon Best Work by a CCP Member. Golding presented her first public art commission Near this spot in Gordon Reserve for PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography in Melbourne. This new commission was supported by a City of Melbourne Arts Grant.
Most recently she co-authored BLAK COOK BOOK: New Cultural Perspectives on Cooks' Cottage. A set of provocations with Dr Paola Balla and Dr Clare Land, published by the City of Melbourne. Golding has been a sessional lecturer in Alternative Photographic Processes at RMIT University, a Masters program mentor at Photography Studies College and is a regular guest speaker.