gemma smith
artist in residence
1 - 30 april 2011
Gemma Smith is our first artist in residence for 2011.
Each year Turner Galleries invites three artists to Perth for a residency and exhibition. Artists are hosted by the Central Institute of Technology, where they stay in comfortable accommodation with a large adjoining studio. Most stay for approximately four weeks. Each artist exhibits with Turner Galleries giving Perth art lovers a chance to see some of Australia’s most outstanding talent.
Gemma Smith's exhibition is a series of new paintings, a set of prints and acrylic sculptures. Her Boulder sculptures are exquisite, constructed from panels of coloured translucent acrylic, they allow the light to travel through them and create refracted optical illusions. Viewed from various angles, they create different colours as sides visually overlap. If a spotlight or daylight hits them, prisms of light are cast around the room. Some boulders on display are made from Plexiglas Radiant, which changes its colour depending on the viewing angle and uses ambient lighting to create its own lighting effects. It produces mirror like reflections and shines in every colour of the rainbow. The Boulder forms themselves are not uniform, much like a boulder in nature, the sides are unpredictable in shape and size. The Boulders are three-dimensional variations on Gemma’s earlier hard edge abstract works, where planes of colour seem to be unfolding on the two dimensional surface.
Her new abstract paintings have softened into gorgeous curves and curls of interlocking colour. Her approach is intuitive, seemingly more relaxed than her hard edged paintings. But this is illusion. On closer inspection these surfaces reveal spatial deceptions and layers of colour. She is using the same systematic approach to design and composition ideals as can be perceived in her sculptures and hard edge paintings. She has her own set of rules for each series that she breaks and starts anew when artworks start to become predictable.
Gemma will be creating a set of prints for the Turner Galleries Art Angels, the major sponsor of the residency programme, and one set will be included in the exhibition. In these prints Gemma logically follows the systematic overlaying of colours to map out the number of variables within a limited palette. In this case the number was six.
Gemma is from Sydney but currently resides in Brisbane, where her works can be found in the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland, Queensland College of Art and the Queensland University of Technology. Further afield her artworks have been collected by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Deakin University in Melbourne and Murdoch University here in Perth.
Photographer: Victor France
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