GEMMA SMITH

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR ART PRACTICE TO a stranger?

I make abstract paintings … occasionally sculptures but everything has circled around painting, and colour, to the exclusion of everything else really, for the past decade.

Let’s go back a while. Tell me about your early years.

I graduated from Sydney College in 1999. I showed in artist-run spaces for almost a decade before my first commercial show. Some of the first shows that really mattered to me, and still do to this day, were at Gallery 19, Imperial Slacks, and Melbourne’s Penthouse and Pavement. I had time to experiment with both making