Katrina Barter
Gallery 1
Opening Thursday 19 February, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 20 Febraury - Sunday 15 March 2026
Katrina Barter’s practice focuses on exploring the mysterious nature of consciousness and memory. Resonance brings together a selection of acrylic paintings on unprimed jute that highlight the intensity of feeling that comes from strong memory recall, irrespective of our relative time parameters in which we live our days, months and years.
The works explore what happens when memories surface as felt experiences. Rather than treating memory as something fixed in the past, the paintings consider how it can arrive suddenly with intensity as part of our present consciousness. Memory is approached as current sensations: immediate, vivid, and palpable.
Barter’s visual language is grid-based, a foundation of her practice both conceptually and technically. The grid is used as a metaphor for consciousness, made up of units that are connected, modular and systematic like our individual experiences of memory. The grid provides a framework for abstraction, reflecting the dynamic nature of consciousness, and providing a space for Barter’s own experiences to be interpreted subjectively by the viewer via the process of abstraction.
As her source, Barter works from moments first captured through photography and drawing, which are gridded up to align to a corresponding canvas. For the works in Resonance, high tonal contrast and saturated colour create visual tension, while the raw jute surface plays an active role. Its coarse texture absorbs paint unevenly, making the physical process visible and reinforcing a sense of immediacy and presence.
Resonance invites viewers to encounter memory as something lived in the present.
About the Artist
Katrina Barter is a visual artist working primarily in painting. Her practice explores memory and consciousness, with a particular focus on how memories are felt and re-experienced in the present, rather than understood as fixed narratives of the past.
Barter’s work is structured through the grid, which underpins the practice both visually and conceptually. Used as a metaphor for consciousness, the grid is composed of interconnected units that reflect the fragmented and shifting nature of memory. Works develop through the abstraction of personal memories captured through photography and drawing, which are then translated into grid-based compositions.
She works with acrylic paint coupled with graphite and pencil markers of the grid composition process. Informed by her background in textile practice, she selects each canvas material for its weave, texture and compositional fit with the source image. The canvas cloth is an active component of the composition rather than a neutral support. The interaction between paint and surface is central to the physical and emotional presence of the paintings.
Barter seeks to create spaces for contemplation by inviting viewers to bring and project their own memories and experiences onto the work.
She lives and works on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra.