'I am excited by the power abstraction has to communicate in ways other language can’t. I see my practice as an ebb and flow of controlling and letting go; setting up structures to work within, but also surrendering to the process.'
Kate Vassallo is an Australian visual artist of Maltese heritage, born and based on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country in Canberra. Working across painting, drawing and installation, she considers labour, control and time through visual abstraction.
Vassallo graduated from the Australian National University School of Art in 2010 with First Class Honours and a University Medal. She has since exhibited regularly throughout Australia, including recent exhibitions at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery and Canberra Contemporary Art Space.
When making, she designs complex sets of rules and systems. Heavily focused on materiality, this disciplined creative process is repetitious and slow moving. While structured and preplanned, equally important to Vassallo is leaving space for agency, intuition and chance. Her practice is an ebb and flow of controlling and letting go, while wanting to create artworks that elicit soft sensations of light, space, time and memory.
Her artworks are held in the collections of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank, Canberra Health Services, Goulburn Regional Gallery, Goulburn Mulwaree Council, Megalo Print Studio (Canberra) and Ovolo Group (Sydney), as well as private collections throughout Australia and the USA.