Natalie Lavelle

Australian artist, Natalie Lavelle is best known for her edging strips of (semi-)exposed linen, and layers of colour. At the centre of her practice lies a profound engagement with the very substance of paint. She explores the physical, spatial and material existence and considers those relationships with abstraction. Washes of colour are pulled across her works to create thin layers of pigment, which she gradually layers on top of one another. 

Each semi-translucent layer forms new formal relationships, blends, and associations with the next. Throughout this process she openly acknowledges materiality, perception and objecthood so that there is capacity for experience. Recent paintings contemplate specific colour considerations. Stained with soft hues of pinks and purples, the surface gives the impression of a fading blemish. 

As your gaze shifts through the canvas, you notice the erasure of her paint and its contusion with each weft and weave of the linen. Her practice wavers between human and material concerns where abstraction and monochrome paintings have become the foundation of a pursuit to re-blur the limitations and boundaries of the traditional easel painting. 

Resonating with colour field painters and post-minimalists, as well as the language of early non-objective painting, her early work consists of precise, monochrome geometries embedded together with string. She has more recently worked with colour, staining and spatial considerations. Working in arenas of rich-pigment acrylics and oils, her practice explores surprising polarities such as, the artist's control and spontaneity, and the works' materiality and pictorial illusion. 

Her practice wavers in human and material concerns where abstraction and monochrome paintings have become the foundation of a personal pursuit to re-blur the limitations and boundaries of the traditional easel painting