Gayle Stockley, four square grid, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Al Munro & Gayle Stockley
Gallery 1
Opening Thursday 22 January, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 23 January - Sunday 15 February
An exhibition by artists Al Munro and Gayle Stockley, exploring colour, geometric abstraction and the application of found cardboard to non-objective painting. Works in the exhibition explore the materiality of cardboard - cardboard as colour, structure and surface – in combination with minimalist abstraction.
Cardboard is the essence of ubiquity. In an era where online ordering and delivery of goods direct to our homes, cardboard packaging is now more common than ever. In The Cardboard Works, artists Al Munro and Gayle Stockley investigate their shared interest in the material qualities of cardboard, and its application to minimalist painting. Employing cardboard in their work, the artists investigate corrugated cardboard in relation to abstract structure, colour, texture, surface and form.
Al’s work engages with cardboard as colour, structure and surface, exploring its relationship to pattern in an extension of her previous works. The continue to explore ‘disturbed’ surfaces and relief forms to affect the way a viewer experiences the works. Found cardboard is used as an ‘active substrate’ – as colour, texture and pattern within the works.
Gayle’s artwork makes use of non-objective painting and relief sculpture to explore line, form and colour with a focus on simple, geometric form. By introducing cardboard to her work, Gayle is interested in exploring its specific material qualities and how these interact with the other elements of her work; the manufactured quality of the cardboard and its internal structures contrast with the loose, hand-rendered qualities of her paintings. Her work in The Cardboard Works is a continuation of recent work on cardboard and exploring further the material, its mid-tone colour as a base and the possibilities when used as collage and referencing Italian contemporary artist Tony Vivaci.
About the Artists
Al Munro
Al Munro is Canberra-based artist whose interests span painting, drawing and textile-based practices. Her art practice and research draw on diverse fields including artistic abstraction, geometry and textile patterning to explore the relationships between visual art, design and mathematics. Al has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, and her work is held in public and private collections.
Gayle Stockley
After living and studying in Perth, Melbourne and Canberra, in 1993 Gayle settled in Wamboin NSW where she has a studio. Her painting style evolved after a 7- year period making sculpture. Since that time, she has been exploring the play between colour, line and geometric form, drawing inspiration from Brancusi, Ellsworth Kelly and geometry in primitive art.