Katey Smoker

Punctuation

 

Exhibition Date

12 June > 13 July 2025

Exhibition OPENING

Thursday 12 June 2025, 6 > 8PM, All Welcome


 Visual Rating 100%

The Linden Projects Space can be accessed via an older lift that is not DDA compliant and requires staff operation. Our team is always available to assist—please let us know if you need support during your visit.

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Punctuation doesn’t just mark silence in a sentence. It shapes meaning and tone through subtle absences and divisions. In this work, white cubic forms take on this role, activating the negative space and shaping how the surrounding area is experienced. Like punctuation in language, these forms structure and disrupt. 

Made entirely from paint and spread across the gallery floor, this is a painting to be navigated rather than simply viewed. Controlled yet open-ended, the work draws on minimalist traditions, using restraint and reduction to prompt a reconsideration of what a painting can be. Rather than offering a fixed viewpoint, the arrangement creates a sequence of pauses, separations and connections that invites a slower, more spatial kind of engagement. This is not just a collection of cubes. It’s a disruption. It is a new way for paint to take up space and be understood through presence rather than image.



Katey Smoker is an artist who approaches paint from a different perspective. Her process involves repetition, accumulation and variation, allowing paint to flow, crack, stretch, and settle in ways that are both unpredictable and revealing. The result is not a painting to be viewed. It is something to be encountered, where the materiality and transformation of paint becomes the work itself.

Holding a Bachelor of Contemporary Art and a Bachelor of Metallurgical Engineering from the University of South Australia, Smoker’s multidisciplinary background informs her exploration of materiality and process. Her final-year body of work, A Delicate Balance between Intention and Intuition, was featured in the 2024 Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. She was also a resident artist in the 2024 ACE Studio Program and received the Major Exhibition Prize at the 2024 Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition.


IMAGE > Katey Smoker, White (detail), 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Photograph: Sam Roberts.

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