Lara Kittel (she/her) is a South Australian emerging artist currently undertaking her honours at the Adelaide Central School of Art. Her current honours project, uses oil paint to explore the Australian tourist gaze from the position of both participant and critic, revealing tensions between personal experience and commodified spectacle. She engages in a cycle of research, photography, painting, and reflection to create a visual framework for understanding how places are marketed and consumed.

Kittel seeks to reveal the mediated representations of Australian landscapes that create tension and estrangement, framing land as something to be collected or conquered. Through thick, tactile brushwork and disrupted surfaces, she expose’s how shared images shape collective expectations and desires, challenging the way tourism turns land into a consumable experience rather than a living environment.

A 2022 Adelaide Central School of Art graduate, Kittel was a finalist in the 2023 Heart of the Bush exhibition in Goondiwindi, Queensland. She undertook an artist residency in 2024 at A Position on Retreat in Vancouver Island, where she expanded her practice through en plein air painting in the old-growth forests of Avatar Grove. Kittel has exhibited in several group shows, including, The Disconnect at Floating Goose Studios and the 2025 SALA exhibition This is Australia. She was a finalist in the 2023 and 2024 Gallery M Contemporary Art Prize and won the 2023 Ian Wilding Emerging Artist Prize.