For Karen Hammat, painting has been a lifelong endeavour, beginning with her earliest explorations with a paintbrush as a kindergartener and continuing into her life today as a full-time artist.

After completing a degree in Visual Art in 2005, Karen gradually shifted the balance between her professional practice as a psychologist and her art practice, increasingly devoting herself to painting.

Drawn to the freedom of abstraction, Karen is captivated by colour, movement and mark-making. Her practice is intuitive and exploratory, immersing her in the physical and sensory experience of painting. Through this process, she seeks to capture and record a glimpse of the fundamental energies from which all things arise.

For Karen, painting is an ongoing exploration of the unseen — an attempt to give form to something that can be felt but not easily described.

My paintings are not intended to describe the world, but to point towards something within it that cannot easily be described.

There is an old Zen saying: “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” I think of my paintings in much the same way. They are gestures towards something beyond themselves — glimpses of an underlying reality, a presence, an energy that can be felt but cannot be fully captured or named.

Abstraction gives me the freedom to work in this space between the visible and the invisible. Through colour, mark, movement and rhythm, I work intuitively, allowing the painting to unfold rather than beginning with a fixed image or conclusion. I immerse myself in the process and respond to what emerges, searching for moments when the painting seems to carry something beyond the physical materials from which it is made.

I am captivated by the concept that the complexity and apparent randomness of life exists within an underlying energy — a life force from which everything arises. Painting becomes a way of attending to that mystery, of trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of it and leave a trace of the encounter.

The painting, like the finger, is not the moon. It is an invitation to look. And perhaps, for a moment, to see beyond.

• Worn Untether Gallery, Geelong, Victoria, Australia. 19 March – 4 April 2026.
• Autumn Harvest, Sol Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia, April 2024.
• Women in Art AAD Gallery Sydney, Australia, March 2024.
• She, Her, They, Them. International online exhibition, IncuArts. 2021.
• Swiss Art Expo, Artbox. Project 3. Semi-finalist, Zurich Switzerland 2021.

• 2016 Adelaide Cathedral Art Show. Winner. Best Abstract Expression prize.
• Karen has also been a finalist in a number of prestigious art prizes, including the Glover Prize, the Art2Life International Juried Art Exhibition and the Women United Art Prize.

Karen Hammat's work is held in private collections across Australia, Europe, the United States and Britain.

• In the Spotlight: Karen Hammat. Women United Art Magazine. Issue XIV Summer 2026. p24 –27.