Kate Stewart

Intermission

March 7 – 29th, 2025

Five Walls Gallery & Projects is thrilled to announce the launch of our inaugural RMIT Graduate Art Award, an award that celebrates excellence and innovation in painting, drawing, and sculpture among graduating students.

We are pleased to congratulate Kate Stewart as the recipient of the 2025 Five Walls Graduate Art Prize. In recognition of her outstanding artistic achievements, Kate will present her solo exhibition, Intermission, at Five Walls from March 7th to 29th, 2025.

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Intermission is a sculptural installation that brings together a range of materials and found objects, combining my fascination with the metaphorical potential of everyday items with a playful subversion of art-historical tropes. Inspired by the poet Jorie Graham’s words—“How I wish there were an intermission / A velvet curtain would descend / To let the story cool off / for a while / So we could catch up” — the exhibition invites viewers to step away from the current rush of reality, to pause and reflect.

At the heart of Intermission is the idea of suspension, not only as a physical condition but as a metaphor for the potentiality of the in-between. I use gravitational pull as a means of shaping sculptural forms, with geometric abstract paintings casually draped over rods made of wood and metal, held in place by magnets and hung at varying heights. In this series, I disrupt the inherent formality of the paintings’ velvet surface, introducing a tension between affect and austerity, between control and release.

Rooted in a minimalist approach, my work employs a pared-down vocabulary of materials and interventions. I engage with a diverse range of objects — galvanized steel, chrome beads, magnets, metal curtain cords, velvet, mica-based paint, and corrugated polycarbonate panels—to create a dynamic interplay between formal rigor and provisional, spontaneous gestures. This interaction fosters a subtle tension, with meanings unfolding across different mediums and materials, generating complex, non-binary interpretations.

The works in Intermission continue my exploration of destabilization, disruption, and dissonance. Using a New Materialist, diffractive lens, I reimagine the formal language of Minimalism, embracing uncertainty, experimentation, and serendipity as core elements of my process. The work exists in the space between things—between thought and gesture, between history and the present—challenging the viewer to reconsider how we experience space, time, and meaning.