Kate Small reconstructs familiar institutional spaces that evoke personal encounters. Influenced by post-1970s American documentary photography, her sumptuously coloured, skilfully composed paintings of people at school sports fields, public swimming pools, changing sheds or waiting rooms reveal the uneasy social space of these communal settings.

Hyperreal, solarised colourways expose the shimmer of under-painting and evoke patterns of technological glitch, where awkward perspectives and flattened juxtapositions of people in space expose the tension of subtle social manipulations and interactions underneath the surface.

As the venue for her disliked school swimming sports in the early 1980s, Thorndon Pool, recalls the artist’s childhood memories of ‘shivering humiliation’. Tones of sunburn pink, harsh orange, and concrete grey, coupled with the strange spatial dynamics and bright unforgiving surfaces in this work recall a sense of visceral, public exposure.

Kate Small (born 1968, Lower Hutt) graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland in 1991. Represented by Anna Miles Gallery, Small’s works are held in private and public collections in New Zealand and overseas including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Small won Supreme Award at the 6th Wairarapa Review in 2009 and lives and works in Masterton.