Three dimensional cast paint sculpture by Adelaide artist Katey Smoker.

Artist Statement

My work comes from a sense of disconnection and a need to understand how paint can hold itself together. I am drawn to paint for its sensitivity and to the grid for the structure it provides. The grid allows the work to stand on its own, but paint never fully submits to it. That tension is where the work begins.

I transform paint from surface into object through an experimental, material led process of casting, layering and joining small units of paint. Working through repeated units allows me to stay with the material long enough to understand its limits and capacities. The process is direct and restrained, allowing the material to build gradually and assert its own presence. What drives me is wanting to understand how paint moves, builds and holds itself within and against itself.

With a background in metallurgy and material science, I am attentive to how materials react, settle, and change over time. This approach shifts focus away from the canvas or frame and toward paint as a material with its own weight and logic. I think about how the work occupies space and how its weight and density are felt rather than read. It is conceptually informed, but led by material sensitivity, with the thinking happening through process rather than explanation.

Sitting between painting and sculpture, my works deal with contradiction, vulnerability, and sensation. They never fully belong to either category, and that unsettled position is central to my practice. I am interested in creating pieces that ask to be looked at closely and differently and in how sensitivity can hold as much weight as concept.

Biography

I am an Adelaide-based Australian abstract artist. I hold a Bachelor of Contemporary Art and a Bachelor of Metallurgical Engineering from the University of South Australia. My 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 Arts. I was a 2024 Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) Studio resident and received the Major 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 Prize (2020).