Working with paint as both medium and structure, Katey Smoker’s practice moves between two and three dimensions to explore how material and process can challenge traditional definitions of painting. She is interested in states of suspension, where movement is felt but not always seen, and how fragility and stability can coexist. Cast into gridded forms and then assembled, her works are made entirely of paint, sometimes presented on canvas, at other times built into objects. Her process involves slow and deliberate layering, engaging with time and labour as embedded elements of form. Her work invites a slower kind of looking where imperfection and incompleteness become part of how meaning is held.

Referencing the language of architecture and design, she uses the grid as both a stabilising framework and a site of disruption. While grounded in repetition and systems, her work resists uniformity. It asks how we locate ourselves within systems that promise order but are shaped by human inconsistencies and the realities of lived experience. Her work reflects a desire to hold complexity without resolution, where materiality and process shape how a painting is experienced.

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 Motion (upcoming), every*where: Adelaide Design Week, SA

2025 Punctuation, Linden New Art, St Kilda, VIC

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

Photography by Sam Roberts