Kate Vassallo is an Australian-Maltese visual artist, currently based on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country (Canberra, Australia). Vassallo designs materially driven systems as a methodology to produce artworks, combining rules, repetitious labour and serendipitous material textures. These systems are often provocations for potential occurrences. Equal parts chance and conscious decision-making in the studio, rules dictate the composition, colours and density of Vassallo’s abstract works. While making, Vassallo considers the ambiguous nostalgic associations that the artworks can connect with, and hopes that viewers may draw their own associations prompted by the material qualities.

The paintings in Vassallo’s exhibition are repetitiously and ritualistically built up slowly with thin layers of acrylic paint. Incorporating a repetitious mark making process, these works are made in a controlled and disciplined fashion. The paint is always applied by dragging a brush in a consistent radial direction. Using a random scatter of points to inform the shape of each layer, these overlapping forms of negative space build up a geometric haze in the centre of the artworks. Each layer of painted colour obscures or merges with those beneath, changing visually over time in relation to one another. Through developing these softly geometric works, Vassallo considers colour and light in an indirect or abstracted way, while also aiming to imbed a sense of time, memory and labour into their surfaces.