In Gemma Smith’s work, colour is – to paraphrase the English painter Bridget Riley – promiscuous. For the past two decades, Smith, an artist celebrated for her dynamic experiments with colour, flatness and composition, has occupied a compelling position within the lineage of Australian geometric abstraction. Her work resonates with a rhythmic precision, the artist having carved out a niche grounded in the interplay of painterly spontaneity and the structured application of paint. Smith’s approach to painting is marked by a meticulous attention to the vibrational and illusory effects of colour shapes, resulting in a visual language that is situated within distinct bodies of work.
Early works of Smith’s, her Adaptables, 2004–08, are reconfigurable sculptures made from hinged plywood that invite the viewer to manipulate and reformulate their colour sequences. As sculptures, these works are also shapes for the viewer to literally move their body around, wherein the navigation around colours, shapes and the work itself functions like a dialogue between energetic conversationalists. In her Adaptables, Smith employs irregular forms that look abducted from the canvas, inviting the viewer into an active relationship with the work. These objects, while distinct from her paintings, amplify Smith’s central artistic concerns: the fluid boundaries between perception and materiality, between control and chance.
Working on linen, canvas and more public wall works, Smith employs precise geometric patterns and carefully modulated colour relationships in her more traditional paintings. It is through different bodies of work that her hand has been both central conceit and hidden figure. Smith has a condition called aphantasia that prevents her from conjuring images in her mind. Also known as ‘mind-blindness’, it is often experienced by artists. As such, Smith has described how visually unpacking other artists’ work offers a set of ‘material questions’ that allow her to examine the decisions that led to particular material outcomes. Her own material processes concern a set of technical strategies that she defines and refines over time through experimentation with self-imposed mark-making rules and games of chance.
Bask, 2023, is Smith’s most recent work, and operates like a self-portrait. It is part of a series of large-scale works that are a direct product of the artist’s physical limitations. Using, in her own words, ‘large, raspy brushes that cover a vast area in a single layer only to be sculpted back in with a cloth’, Smith created Bask by painting in broad, sweeping gestures, her arm her fully extended.1All quotes by Gemma Smith are from an email conversation with the artist, 20 Nov. 2024. ‘For me, in making the work, the gestures aren’t indexical. I don’t see them as evidence of a painting performance I made in the studio,’ Smith says. ‘The paintings are culminations of compositional decisions – added, erased, modified, each gesture produced at speed – but each painting the product of months of daily layers. Some of these layers are buried, not visible anymore.’ This act of erasure forms, somewhat paradoxically, hard, geometric edges.
Smith’s process exemplifies a tension between the calculated and the intuitive, the technical and the poetic, the planned and chance encounters with paint. Bask exemplifies the subtle gradients and fabrications of depth and movement across her series Orbits, in which each painting communicates an intermingling of painted layers oscillating between harmony and dissonance.
Amita Kirpalani is Curator, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Notes
All quotes by Gemma Smith are from an email conversation with the artist, 20 Nov. 2024.