Kate Vassallo is an Australian visual artist based in Kamberri/Canberra, known for her deeply introspective practice that spans painting and drawing. Vassallo’s work is an exploration of labour, control, and time, often driven by a balance between structure and intuition. Her creative process is deliberate and repetitive, layering materials with painstaking attention to detail, while leaving room for chance and agency. This interplay allows her to create artworks that evoke soft sensations of light, space and time.

In her coloured pencil drawings, Vassallo meticulously builds base structures using randomly scattered points, which she then fills with thousands of fine, straight lines. These lines create controlled, optical patterns that appear smooth and polished from a distance, yet reveal subtle imperfections upon closer inspection. The slow, methodical mark-making reflects both the passage of time and the artist’s personal introspection. These works, deeply personal and meditative, become abstract visual records of labour and time, blurring the lines between the mechanical and the human.

Vassallo’s exhibition, Ripple, brings together works that include paintings from her Bloom series and drawings from the same body of work as the major pieces recently commissioned for the 2024 Dobell Australian Drawing Biennale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The exhibition offers a snapshot of Vassallo’s evolving artistic practice, bridging her smaller, intimate works with monumental undertakings. The Bloom series, which began as 38 acrylic paintings on canvas, reflects her interest in layering thin washes of paint to create unique textures and colours. These works were digitised and reproduced on vinyl for a large-scale public art installation at the Canberra Hospital Critical Services building, where they now adorn over 130 sites. The transformation of these paintings from intimate canvases to expansive digital artworks highlights the tactile quality of the material, while emphasising the handmade imperfections that embody the passage of time and memory. The public artwork invites viewers to pause and reflect, providing a sense of warmth and care in contrast to the clinical hospital environment.

In Ripple, Vassallo also features a series of drawings similar to those presented in the 2024 Dobell Australian Drawing Biennale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. For this six-part series, Gain and Loss (100 pencils), Vassallo created her largest drawing to date, using 100 coloured pencils chosen at random. The drawings are driven by a random scattering of used staples, which form the base structure, and are built up with careful, repetitive mark-making. This ongoing series of drawings, like much of Vassallo’s work, is a meditation on labour and time, with each piece revealing a complex interplay between control and chance. The large-scale work pushes the boundaries of her practice and highlights her ongoing commitment to creating art that is both meditative and deeply personal.

Kate Vassallo shares, “It’s a real pleasure to pull all these ideas and processes together in one exhibition. It all feels very interconnected. A deep connection to process and materially driven making is at the heart of what I enjoy in the studio. It’s a very satisfying feeling to plan a structure of rules or steps and then see where it leads me. Working in this way allows me to be quite ambitious with work, without feeling too intimidated. From one work to the next I can always tweak and push and progress what I’m doing. To an audience, this might seem very subtle; those slight adjustments from painting to painting, or drawing to drawing might not be discernible, but to me, it’s a big part of my focus.” She continues, “My practice is also about acknowledging and reminding myself that although I set rules and expectations for my work, failure is okay. In fact, it’s often through these mistakes and failures that the magic in my artworks emerges.”

Ripple brings together these diverse elements of Vassallo’s practice, celebrating the meticulous labour, time, and personal introspection that define her work. Through her paintings, drawings, and public art projects, Vassallo continues to explore the intersections of light, space, time, and memory, offering viewers an intimate, sensory experience that invites reflection and pause.

Rhianna Melhem
Curator

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