Kate Vassallo’s Ripple, her latest exhibition on now at Artereal Gallery in Sydney, holds special significance for both artist and space. For Vassallo, it marks a fitting end to a transformative 2024, during which the Canberra/Kamberri-based artist completed two major bodies of work years in the making. For Artereal, it’s a fitting end to the gallery’s nearly two-decade legacy of presenting bold, thought-provoking contemporary art, as it prepares to close its doors.

“The Artereal team has always been open to experimental work and willing to take risks in ways that many commercial galleries won’t,” says Vassallo. “I’ve always really admired that about their programming. They’ve been incredibly supportive, and it’s been such a special experience to be part of it.”

Vassallo’s practice is rooted in process, exploring the spaces between labour, control, intuition, and agency. Her abstract, often geometric drawings and paintings are deliberate and repetitive, with each layer of material applied with painstaking attention to detail. The resulting works are deeply meditative, inviting viewers to reflect on the delicate sensations of light, space, colour, and time.

Vassallo has become widely regarded for her coloured pencil drawings, which she begins by randomly plotting points across paper. She then meticulously fills the composition with thousands of fine, straight lines, each placed to build intricate, immersive patterns. Ripple features some of Vassallo’s most ambitious pencil drawings to date, following her monumental six-piece, 150 x 650 cm pencil drawing Gain and loss (100 pencils),2024, created for the 2024 Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

“Kate’s practice is very representative of the kind of artists we tend to work with and be drawn to,” says Artereal’s Associate Director Rhianna Melhem. “Her work has an experimental edge—she is always creating new rules and formulas within her practice that she dictates to herself and then follows religiously in order to achieve an outcome that perfectly balances chance and discipline.”

Vassallo reflects that her background in ballet and dance may have laid the foundations of her rhythmic, disciplined drawing practice. It certainly didn’t stem from a love of maths. “It’s maths-adjacent maybe, but for the record I was terrible at maths at school,” she says with a laugh. She observes that her meticulous approach to drawing resonates with the traditional Maltese craft of lace making—a skill woven into her family’s history, though not directly passed down to her after her parents migrated to Australia. Recently, her father returned from a trip to Malta with materials for her to explore the craft, leaving her curious about where this new skill might lead.

Ripple also marks Vassallo’s largest showing of paintings since she began exploring the medium five years ago. Using a similar approach to her pencil works, the paintings evolve into softer, more sensual forms, with layers building to create a subtle serenity. “The way I approach the compositions is much the same as the drawings, but the outcome is completely different,” she explains. “I love how indirect they are—the more layers I add, the more it softens the straight lines and creates this sense of ambiguity. It’s a new way of thinking about colour, and a whole new process to play with.”

Her Bloom series, which began as 38 acrylic paintings on canvas, formed the fertile ground for a major ACT Government commission with Creative Road Art Projects as part of the Canberra Hospital Expansion Project in 2024. The paintings were digitised and reproduced on vinyl for the new Canberra Hospital Critical Services building, where they now adorn over 130 sites including waiting rooms, corridors, operating theatres and wards. “Placing art in a building is so different from a gallery,” says Vassallo. “Especially in a hospital, which is both a functional and an emotionally charged space. I wanted to understand the different aspects of a hospital and respond to them through the work.” Many of these original paintings and studies for this project debut in Ripple.

“It’s such pleasure to bring all these ideas and processes together in one exhibition,” says Vassallo. “At the heart of my work is a deep connection to process and materially driven making. It’s satisfying to plan a set of rules or steps and see where it leads.” However, Vassallo acknowledges that her practice is also about breaking the rules. “It’s about recognising that although I set expectations for my work, failure is okay. Often, it’s through the mistakes and failures that the magic emerges.”

Indeed, as Melhem concludes: “More than anything, I hope we are remembered as a gallery that injected a little bit of magic into every exhibition we presented.”

Ripple
Kate Vassallo
Artereal Gallery
On now—­­29 March