Vietta Korren-Steele - 'TrACTION'

Wednesday 10 April - Sunday 12 May 2019 

Click here for artwork by Vietta Korren-Steele

Ongoing research and experimentation have played a crucial part in Vietta Korren-Steele’s development through reductionist methods of colour and form.

Important in this process has been the deployment of chance, both in her choice of materials and as a compositional device. She plays between structure and spontaneity and stops at that point when a calm tension in the work is achieved; a sense of trust is reached.

Vietta Korren-Steele’s practice draws inspiration from organic and industrial forms, informed by her upbringing in Victoria’s Mallee region and subsequent relocation to Melbourne.

Korren-Steele’s new body of work reconciles these two spheres, exposing their interdependence. The intersecting tubular forms simultaneously evoke the charred pipelines and roads of the urban landscape, and at closer examination, the cellular microbial lifeforms of the natural world. Crossing boundaries of scale and materiality, the result is a layered system of intricately connected parts.

Whereas her previous series, the Gravity Series, used line and colour to create the illusion of infinite depth, the current series plays with infinity in the fractal sense; the multiplication of infinitely smaller planes. In a compositional sense, this deceiving complexity stems from formal principles; the balance of shape, form and line, and controlled use of colour. However, there is an element of the improvised within the premeditated, a necessary compromise between intention and chance. Far from being crystallised and stagnant abstractions, these formal principles become endless sources of regeneration.