KATE VASSALLO
Echo and Traces
Designing materially driven systems as a methodology to produce artworks, Kate Vassallo combines rules, repetitious labour and serendipitous material textures when making artworks. Equal parts chance and conscious decision-making in the studio, rules dictate the composition, colours and density of her abstract artworks. While making, the artist considers the ambiguous nostalgic associations that her artworks can connect with and hopes that viewers will draw their own associations to this, prompted by the material qualities.
Echo and Traces is a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kate Vassallo. These materially focused works look at abstract ways to consider light, colour, depth and nostalgia. Repetitiously and ritualistically built up slowly over a year long period, these artworks aim to imbed a sense of time, memory and labour into their surfaces.
Kate Vassallo’s ‘echo’ paintings are softly geometric works made up with many thin layers of paint. Each layer uses a random scatter of points to dictate the form, the negative space of which is then painted by radially dragging a brush to the edge of the board. These overlapping forms of negative space build up the geometric haze in the centre of each painting. Each layer of painted colour obscures or merges with those beneath, changing visually over time in relation to one another. These works are made in a controlled and disciplined fashion, the artist carefully following instructions while also considering the overall outcome of the painting. Despite using rules and systems, her agency over the artworks is still present.
By contrast, the ‘trace’ artworks on raw canvas are uncontrolled. The artist is absolving her agency in these works. Tossed around as painting rags in the studio, these are created using a build up of leftover paint from the echo works that would usually be discarded. Sharper marks are applied to the canvas when cleaning the paint off of a palette knife or bristles of a loaded paintbrush, while the softer washes and pools are created when wiping excess paint off a wet painting palette or pouring dirty rinse water over the canvas. These pieces have painted themselves, evolving over time based on the development of the echo paintings.
Exhibiting these works together is a stark visual contrast, but their coexistence is core to their essence. As people spend time with these works, the artist hopes that visual connections between the echoes and traces emerge. These interlinked processes in the studio form part of mini ecosystem of dependant tangents. Kate Vassallo has always been fascinated by process and the ‘mysterious’ goings on that occur in artists studios. Within her art practice, she hopes to find indirect ways to illustrate artistic processes for audiences.
