Stepping into artist Katie McGowan’s studio at Cornerstone Studios on a spring afternoon, you become immersed in a world of motion. Sunlight filters through foliage from Camberwell Road and the building’s Georgian windows, casting changing patterns across her studio walls. Within, paintings layered with hues of blue and green oil paint gestures, taking form through her emotional and distinct visual language ‘Wavism’.

For Katie, her path into painting and carving out her own visual language was far from direct. After studying Physics at university, she spent seven years working in tech before returning to art through painting in 2019. “Painting actually began as a creative outlet for me,” she says, “and from there, it grew very organically.”

Following months of experimentation, Katie made a defining stroke (quite literally) in her work, which led to the emergence of a visual approach that finally felt like her own. “I spent that entire summer experimenting relentlessly with different materials, techniques and tools,” she reflects. “After months of trial and error, something finally clicked.”

What emerged became ‘Wavism’, a visual language shaped by movement and emotion through flowing form. Nestled somewhere between abstraction and figuration it’s something recognisable enough to feel familiar, while fluid enough to feel dreamlike and emotional. “I became obsessed with nature, tides, wind, reflections, changing light, fabric, hair, clouds and water and how emotion itself feels wave-like. Nothing is static. Even memory feels fluid,” Katie explains. Influenced by Impressionism and Renaissance painting in terms of texture and luminosity, the work resists direct imitation in favour of something more personal. “It has my own personal soul of femininity added to it,” she reflects.

Before that language could exist, came discipline. “I spent years drawing and working on portraits to understand tone, colour and form so I could break all the rules and create a new way of painting,” she says. That tension between structure and release still defines her practice today. The process of building a recognisable voice has also meant sitting with uncertainty. “Every artist questions themselves at some point,” she says. “When you’re developing something personal, there’s often a stage where it doesn’t fit neatly into existing categories yet.” Still, she adds, “discomfort is usually a sign you’re getting closer to something authentic.”

Her studio at Cornerstone Studios plays its own role in that evolution. “My studio has the most incredible energy and natural light,” she says. “Especially in the summer, when the late afternoon sun spills across the paintings, the whole space feels really atmospheric and inspiring to work in.” Being surrounded by other creatives reinforces a sense of momentum and shared process.

What defines McGowan’s practice now is repetition, intuition and disciplined experimentation. “Developing a genuine artistic voice takes much longer than people often realise,” she says. “It’s built through experimentation, failure, refinement and trusting your instincts enough to keep going even before the work fully makes sense.”

What emerges most clearly from speaking with McGowan is a practice continuing to evolve, one that resists certainty in favour of process, and the slow work of learning when to let go and to simply trust your gut.

Discover more about Katie's practice, here.