Kate Holden
is the author of the memoirs In My Skin and The Romantic: Italian Nights and Days.

By this author


Culture September 12, 2020

Choreographer Shaun Parker

On his company’s 10th anniversary, Shaun Parker – one of the stalwarts of Australian contemporary dance – looks over his shapeshifting career. “It’s weird, I didn’t like it. I loved it. You’d think I’d be more terrified, but I think, beginning to sing or dance or act, you’re becoming another role. I love that feeling of becoming someone else.”

Culture September 14, 2019

The high notes of ACO violinist Satu Vänskä

As the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s principal violin, Satu Vänskä teases astonishing music from her centuries-old instrument. But away from the stage, Vänskä’s musical tastes march to a very different beat. “You know what’s really sad? You can go through your whole life without ever hearing ’90s grunge. Not to mention Bach or Mozart. Or 1970s popular music. If we want to keep our art form alive … we try to bring back music in everyday conversation, so you can encounter something and awake that curiosity.”

Culture August 15, 2020

The Guaia

“The Guaia is three-and-a-half feet tall, with arms as long as she is high. The pads of her fingers are as dark and shiny as wet wood, and splayed like a tree frog’s. Her face is forever young yet strafed, all hollow and crag, sexless. She sleeps behind …”

Culture April 27, 2019

Angelica Mesiti emergent in Venice

As Sydney-born, Paris-based artist Angelica Mesiti prepares to show her three-channel video work Assembly in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, she talks about emotional responses, music as a salve and the vital need for connection. “Dissonance is a word that was really important to this work. Basically, the work is using music as a metaphor. It travels through dissonance, through harmony, through polyphony, through cacophony.”

Culture June 30, 2018

Artist Yvette Coppersmith on the meaning of self-portraiture

Archibald Prize-winning artist Yvette Coppersmith’s principal subject is herself, in works created with little concession to how they might be perceived by others. “To make a work without an awareness of an audience is virtually impossible, even though I began doing portraits or drawings of faces to hang in my childhood room, and that’s probably what I still want to do. It’s a very private process. It’s really private, actually. It’s only the fact that you’re an artist and part of your role is to share your work.”

Portrait June 23, 2018

Choreographer Diane Busuttil

A conversation about movement and personal history, with dancer Diane Busuttil.

Culture April 21, 2018

Evelyn Ida Morris’s piano forte

After a decade of critical acclaim as Pikelet, musician Evelyn Ida Morris is releasing the first music under their own name – a grand suite of piano songs, both sung and speechless, about the experience of being non-binary. “Non-binary is very strange, because it’s about preserving that internal space, and feeling proud of it, and finding ways to communicate it.”

Portrait February 24, 2018

Artist Stuart Ringholt

Inside the studio with conceptual artist Stuart Ringholt.

Culture November 11, 2017

Yorgos Lanthimos on the alienation of realism

Yorgos Lanthimos teams mundane musings and deadpan delivery to create humour and horror. The Greek filmmaker talks about what inspires his twisted metaphors, and who they are for. “We would never make a film to give a solution or preach something or teach something. It’s just human beings, you know, being in this world and trying to make sense of it and exploring various sides of it and going, ‘Huh, what do you think about that?’ ”

Culture October 28, 2017

Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth

As a pioneer of conceptual art, Joseph Kosuth’s reflections on the world’s great thinkers glow with deeper meaning. “It’s not about how, it’s about why,” he says. “So I think – not to be vainglorious about it – I instituted, for very selfish reasons, a view of art as something quite different from the inherited tradition.”

Portrait September 23, 2017

Artistic director Darren O’Donnell

A chat with urban planner, author and artistic director of the theatre company Mammalian Diving Reflex Darren O’Donnell.

Portrait August 12, 2017

A day in home daycare

Daycare operator Eliza and her life committed to children.

Portrait June 10, 2017

Theatre director Adena Jacobs

The Book of Exodus director Adena Jacobs on the ethereal connection between the stage and the audience.

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