Georgina Read is an Australian born artist who lives and works in a remote location in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she maintains a painting studio practice alongside her engagement with local environmental agendas. While the survival of the natural world is her primary concern, her painting is not driven by subject matter. Rather, it is concerned with witnessing the emergence of subjective intent, how it reveals itself, recurs and takes form through the act and within the language of painting. 

She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and an Honours degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2004. Her practice has been informed by extensive travel throughout both the southern and northern hemispheres, undertaken as art research and residencies. These have included Australia and New Zealand, Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic islands, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Nepal, Eastern and Western Europe, Russia and the UK.

Read exhibits infrequently. Her work in the environmental sector, combined with the practical constraints of living remotely, has created barriers to sustained participation in the arts. Consequently, much of the later work presented on this site has not previously been shown to an audience. 

Read remains committed to the tradition of painting. Although her practice has at times moved into expanded forms, she continually returns to painting and to a deeply felt, almost instinctive relationship with the medium. She experiences the abstracted spaces that painting affords as a kind of antidote to the meta-crisis unfolding across the globe, a space in which alternative forms of attention and being remain possible to her.

Despite Reads ongoing involvement in species protection and native forest regeneration projects, she experiences a persistent sense of grief, and a PROFOUND DISQUIET at the ecological destruction unfolding throughout the world. The inability to halt the accelerating forces of ecocide, extinction and human violence remains an inescapable tension within her painting practice.