Kay Lee Williams Receives First Nations Scholarship

Kay Lee Williams has received the 2022 First Nations Visual Arts Scholarship, delivered in partnership with the Byron School of Art (BSA).

Kay is a Kamilaroi artist currently working with silk and wool, creating wearable scarves, wall hangings and soft furnishings. Kay sources beautifully coloured plant fibres, leaves and roots to create natural bush dyes creating surface patterns and colours on textiles. Her work is about identity and place with references to elements, water and earth illustrating her experience with traditional and contemporary techniques and cultural themes. 

The First Nations Visual Arts Scholarship sponsors a First Nations artist to participate in a year-long Visual Arts Foundation Course. Designed to provide an extensive grounding in the Visual Arts, students gain knowledge, skills and experience needed to form an integrated understanding of contemporary visual arts ideas and practices.

Attuned to the needs of individual students, the course is suitable to both emerging artists who wish to establish their practice and established artists who wish to refine or expand. The structured studio program incorporates approaches to a number of disciplines including drawing, painting, printmaking, 3D studies, installation practice, digital media, design principles, colour theory, art history and critical thinking.

The inaugural Recipient Belle Budden is a practising multi-disciplinary artist working with diverse forms to express and maintain her cultural identity and reflect issues of contemporary Aboriginal culture and politics. Belle works with visual arts mediums including paint, printmaking, ceramics, multimedia and is also passionate about dance as a form of cultural expression.