Kate Wallace
Born in Melbourne, Australia, 1990
Lives and works in Melbourne
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. Utilising 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.
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. This receptiveness to quiet detail and transient moments becomes almost meditative and draw on a yearning for peace in simplicity. 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 many of Wallace’s works although particularly those composed of interior spaces, such as 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.
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 her works convey the sensation of an attempt to recollect a place or experience that lies subliminally just within reach. Further to this exploration of memory and conservancy, Wallace also engages with a consideration of preservation in the age of ecological crisis with works that place 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 often originate from human made spaces such as vitrines designed to preserve, protect or archive. Thus, for Wallace there appears to be a desire to capture something precious, an interest in how painting can memorialise or maintain a sense of stillness and fossility where there is external decay.
EDUCATION
2018 MA Contemporary Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
2015 MA Curatorship, University of Melbourne
2012 Bachelor of Art (Fine Art), RMIT University
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024 ‘A View Through a Window’, COMMUNE, Vienna
2024 ‘Details of a room and other places’, LON Gallery, Melbourne
2024 ‘Interiors’, Painters Painting Paintings
2023 ‘The Curve That Warms’, Leila Greiche, New York
2022 ‘Memory of Place’, LON Gallery, Melbourne
2022 ‘A Place Once Travelled’, Morington Peninsula Regional Gallery
2019 ‘Views To Remember’, C3 Contemporary Art Space, Abbotsford
2019 ‘Views to a room’, Kings Artist Run, Melbourne
2018 ‘Pictures’, Alternating Current Art Space, Windsor
2016 ‘In Transit’, Alternating Current Art Space, Windsor
2013 ‘Moving Still’, Red Gallery Contemporary Art Space, Fitzroy
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 'My Place, My Palace', F2t Gallery, Milan
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 ‘Three Hares’, Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton.
2022 ‘Traces’, NARS Foundation, New York,
2022 ‘Blue’, LON Gallery, Melbourne
2022 ‘The Private Eye’, Oigall Projects, Melbourne
2021 ‘Spring 1883’, with LON Gallery, Satellite Spaces
2020 ‘New Landscapes’, LON Gallery, Collingwood
2020 ‘Small Mercies Fundraiser’, River Studies, West Melbourne
2020 ‘Dimensions, Yarra Sculpture Gallery’, Abbotsford
2019 ‘Futures, Hyper Contemporary’, Preston
2019 ‘Coalescence’, Linden Projects Space, St. Kilda
2019 ‘The Museum of Platitudes and Aphorisms’, Rubicon Ari, North Melbourne
2019 ‘The “F” Word’, Trocadero Art Space, Footscray
2019 ‘Love me, love me, say that you love me’, No Vacancy, Melbourne
2018 ‘VCA Masters Graduate Exhibition’, Victorian College of the Arts
2018 ‘#fromwhereistand’, George Patton Gallery, Melbourne
RESIDENCIES / GRANTS / AWARDS
2022 NARS Foundation International Artist’s Residency, New York
2020 Career Development Grant, Australia Council for the Arts
2020 Constant Ecology At Home Residency
2018 Wingate Student Fellowship
2012 Tolarno Hotel/ RMIT Painting Prize
