Katey Smoker’s practice explores the material and conceptual limits of painting. She doesn’t use paint in the traditional sense. Instead, she casts and constructs with it, making works that sit somewhere between painting and sculpture. Each piece carries the evidence of its making, shaped by factors such as temperature, humidity and the resistance of acrylic paint. The resulting forms show subtle shifts, irregularities and sometimes large defects, exposing how paint resists control and reveals its own logic. As she explains:

“It is not just a material. It is a living, shifting thing. It flows, cracks, stretches, and settles in ways that are both unpredictable and revealing. I let it shape itself as much as I shape it. I want it to take up space and to be felt and understood through presence rather than image.”

Smoker is drawn to muted colour tones because they hold a certain restraint. They reflect the subtlety and complexity of experience especially when shaped by movement, uncertainty and the need to adapt. Much of her childhood was spent living in a caravan and travelling across Australia, and these colours connect to memories and impressions from those early years. Red, in particular, recalls dust and heat, vulnerability and the defiance needed to face constant change. That pattern of movement carried into her adult life, leaving her with a shifting sense of place where nothing felt permanent and the familiar was often fleeting. In response she turned to the grid. After years of change, the logic of repetition, structure and process became a way to make sense of things. Rather than confining her work, it has allowed complexity to emerge. The repeated casting and laying of paint mirrors a life shaped by movement, rebuilding and the steady effort of making something hold.

Smoker is an Australian abstract artist based in Adelaide. She holds a Bachelor of Contemporary Art and a Bachelor of Metallurgical Engineering from the University of South Australia. Her final-year body of work, A Delicate Balance between Intention and Intuition, was selected for Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition 2024 at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She was a 2024 ACE Studio resident and received the Major Exhibition Prize at the 2024 Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition. Other awards include the UniSA Creative Graduate Exhibition Prize (2023), the John Christie Wright Memorial Prize for Painting (2023), and the Friends of the South Australian School of Art Inc Prize (2020).

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2025     Linden New Art (12 June - 13 July), St Kilda, VIC. Supported by Helpmann Academy, IAS Fine Art Logistics & Linden New Art                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           2025     No Place Like..., Household, SA                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       2025     In Essence, Adelaide Fringe Festival, Gallery 1855, SA                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               2024     ACE Studios: 2024, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, SA                          
2024     Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, WA                 
2024     Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition, SASA Gallery, SA                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              2024     Short Notice #2, SASA Gallery, SA
2023     Coalesce, Graduate Exhibition, University of South Australia, SA
2022     Off The Grid, Adelaide City Libraries, SALA Festival, SA
2021      May: revisions, interventions, extensions, SASA Gallery, SA
2021      Remade, Gallery 1855, SA