Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2024 - Student interview - 08. Kate Ambrogio

KATE AMBROGIO: My name is Kate Ambrogio, and I studied visual arts at SCEGGS Darlinghurst.

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My body of work is an exploration of the way that art galleries make people behave and make people feel. It's about the ritual of the art gallery space. You have to speak very quietly, and you have to walk around quite slowly. And I think that the fact that people are kind of engaging in those rituals creates this sort of reverent space, which, in combination with this massive, reverent architecture, it really does take you out of the everyday, and it feels quite magical.

So I went around to a whole lot of different art galleries and different exhibitions and took a whole lot of photos of people, and I noticed so much. There was so much detail in their body language that was so interesting to me.

There were a couple of things that I knew were really important to me that I wanted to focus on. I knew I wanted to get that precise, intricate detail of people. So I really love Escher, Escher's graphic sort of compositions. He does a lot of sort of experimentation and playing with perspective. And I had a look at lots of his stuff because I think that what he does with perspective creates a surreal environment, and I think that to use that technique would help me to get the surreal environment that you feel in the art gallery.

The central kind of image that I knew was going to be the centre of my work was this mother and son. And the little boy was pointing at something, and his mum was looking exactly where he was pointing. And I think as soon as you get a point, you have a geometric kind of vector. You have something to look at. And you have this intimate interaction where somebody is communicating where to look.

And I think so much of looking at art and existing in the world as a person is about seeing and being seen. And so for me to see this interaction where this very little boy was communicating to his mum what he was interested in in art, I thought that was just perfect. It's very intimate to me as well because I don't know who the mother and son are. But I feel like I have found something out about them because I spent so long staring at their body language and staring at this little boy and what he was pointing at and what he was saying to his mum and what she was saying to him.

I had a very intentional choice that I made a way into my process, which was that I didn't want any artwork to be visible in my work. I wanted it to stay sort of unknown to the audience what the viewers were actually looking at. And I thought that was really important because I wanted the focus to be on how the art comes through in people and in the body language. I wanted to take out what becomes the central focus when people go to art galleries, which is the art, and I wanted instead to focus on these peripheral factors that sometimes get lost, which are what people are there and also the space that the art is in.

So studying visual arts I think has fostered my love of looking at things and observing things and often people. I think that it's one of the most important things that you can do. I think visual arts teaches you how to see. I think that being attentive and being observant to things and people is the whole point of my body of work.

I got a lot of advice in my process that was you need to keep making stuff pretty much all the time. And as much as I think that's a good piece of advice, I think it's also important you have to consider why you're making that stuff and what you're trying to get at the end of it. I think that to find a balance between those 2 things is probably my main piece of advice, yeah.

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