Kate Wallace

Within her diminutive paintings Kate Wallace works with depictions of interior and natural environments to explore aspects of memory, solitude, and impermanence. Developing from photographs captured in periods of stillness and transit, her paintings belong to places both personal and communal, be it a small detail of a place once lived in, or a window unconsciously passed by daily. Utilizing techniques such as manipulations of light, scale, repetition and obscuring, Wallace translates an essence of our psychological construction of the past through attention to the quiet details that compose our intimate reality, counter to the accelerated and frenetic pace of contemporary experience. For Wallace her practice becomes an exploration of the capacity for painting to preserve the past or more specifically embody a moment, a feeling, a fleeting breath of time. In this sense, each of the works within the exhibition convey the sensation of an attempt to recollect a place or experience that lies subliminally just within reach. Flowing concurrently with this, throughout the works is a stream of obscurity, with particular regard to the use of light, that becomes reflective of the precarity of memory and its vulnerability to alteration and deterioration. We can hone into this effect in works such as ‘Horizon Line’ and ‘314’ where the use of light fluctuates our reading of the composition. The works further develop a sense of yearning or nostalgia for a period once loved, that held a sense of belonging, such as ‘Adrift’ or “A Return to Dark’ where indistinct forms are suggestive of an intangible figure altered by the lens of time. This sense of slipping away is accompanied by a contrasting technique in works such as ‘Summer’ which are composed with heightened detail, as though the obsessive rendering of the motif will hold on to the emotional connection with which it is tethered. Further to this exploration of memory and conservancy, Wallace also engages with a consideration of preservation in the age of ecological crisis. These concerns are echoed in works such as ‘Green World’ and ‘Detail of a Still Life’ that draw meticulous attention to a complex and fragile botanical realm. However, where the forms depicted in each of these portrayals stem from the natural world, upon closer review they originate from human made spaces designed to preserve, protect or archive. In ‘A Small World’ for example we can most clearly see the rendering of a vitrine containing the ecosystem within, although indications of such enclosures can also be seen in elements such as the rock formations in the foreground of ‘Pink Haze’. In her research for the exhibition Wallace notes Georges Perec’s quote: ‘I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin.’ For Wallace there appears to be a desire to capture something precious within these works, an interest in how painting can memorialise or maintain a sense of stillness and fossility where there is external decay. In conjunction with this, a preoccupation with emotional interiority within the works allows for a quiet introspection around aspects of solitude and the details we observe when we are alone or lost in thought. For this exhibition Wallace was particularly inspired by the writings of Lavinia Greenlaw and her considerations on seeing and the unseen. In this respect the following passage holds a precise relevance to the themes behind Wallace’s work: “Sometimes in order to see clearly, we have to place ourselves in the position of not seeing at all. We have to enter the dark or find some other way to lose focus… We have to ‘see nothing’. Seeing without purpose is not the same as seeing without point. It is being open-minded, susceptible, alert, alive.” This receptiveness to quiet detail and transient moments becomes almost meditative and draw on a yearning for peace in simplicity that can be seen in works such as ‘Night Owl’ where the viewer stares out of a window upon distant lights or ‘Departure’ depicting an airplane window with a view disconnected from the world below. However, concurrently with the peaceful stillness there is also a recognition of loneliness within this isolation. In this regard, in equal measure the works oscillate between a veneer of calm with an anxiety of the unknown. This feeling of unease permeates several of the works in the exhibition although is particularly prevalent within those that depict interiors such as ‘A Place of a Former Meeting’, ‘A Pause Between’ and ‘Behind Glass Windows’. Each of the works depict a grey office architecture that alludes to a clinical and austere relationship to the surroundings, devoid of the people traditionally occupying them. In this manner the works hold a heavy silence where one assumes there would be mutterings and clashing of voices and characters. Alongside this, Wallace has engaged with subtle distortions of the space and lines within the compositions, creating a sense of otherness to the interiors and our place within them. * Kate Wallace (b.1990, Melbourne, Australia) currently lives and works in Melbourne. Wallace completed her MA in Contemporary Art in 2018 at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Previously she graduated with an MA in Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne in 2015 and a Bachelors (Fine Art) from RMIT University in 2012. Wallace’s previous exhibitions include: 'My Place, My Palace', F2t Gallery, Milan, 2024; ‘Interiors’ (solo), Painters Painting Paintings, 2024; ‘Details of a room and other places’ (solo), LON Gallery, Melbourne, 2024; ‘the curve that warms’ (solo), Leila Greiche, New York, 2023; ‘Melbourne Now’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2023; ‘Outdoors, Nowhere, in Nothing’, Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, 2023; ‘Making the invisible visible’, Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne, 2023; ‘Spring 1883’, LON Gallery, Melbourne, 2023; ‘Three Hares’, Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, 2023; ‘Memory of place’ (solo), LON Gallery, Melbourne, 2022; ‘Blue’, LON Gallery, Melbourne, 2022; ‘Traces’, NARS Foundation, New York, 2022.