THE INTRA-ACTION OF PAINTING: SURFACE, COLOUR, AND GESTURE AS EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE
The Intra-Action of Painting presents a series of works that explore how abstraction, as a physical and material process, generates form through embodied experience. Painting here is approached as a dialogue between body and material, where gesture and matter co-compose meaning. Rather than seeking control, I approach painting as a zone of entanglement, allowing colour, texture, and movement to unfold their own rhythms. In this space of exchange, painting becomes a living process—unstable, generative, and always in the midst of becoming.
I am drawn to the edges and thresholds of painting—those moments where surface frays, pigment spills, and boundaries blur. The unruly behaviour of the materials I use, which stain, resist, and overflow, mirrors the complexities of lived female experience and care. Through these gestures, colour becomes a visceral force that holds memory, sensation, and emotion within its surface. My work positions painting as a site of resistance and renewal—a place where excess, chance, and affect are not contained but amplified, and where new forms of embodied understanding can emerge.
Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, and currently based in Naarm Melbourne, Toni is an emerging visual artist specialising in layered, abstract mixed-media painting. Her practice explores colour, texture, and gesture as forces that exceed representation, engaging with feminist theories of embodiment, materiality, and intra-action.
In 2023, she was selected by the co-founder and curator of the National Emerging Art Prize (Australia) to participate in a group exhibition. This opportunity led to her first solo exhibition with Michael Reid Northern Beaches in early 2024, followed by a second solo show at Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne later that year. Toni has also participated in several group exhibitions, including a return to Michael Reid Northern Beaches in 2025 and showing with New & Abstract in Berlin, Germany.
Education
2025 Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting), RMIT University, Australia
2019 Certificate IV in Design Communication, Shillington, Australia
2012 Bachelor of Health Science, Charles Sturt University, Australia
2006 Bachelor of Business, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Solo exhibitions
2024
‘Pieces of Us’, Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne, VIC
‘Interiors’, Michael Reid Northern Beaches, Northern Beaches, NSW
Group exhibitions
2025
A4 Y3 Exhibition, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC
New & Abstract, Berlin, Germany
National Emerging Art Prize ACB Selects, Northern Beaches, NSW
2024
Y2 Exhibition, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC
Linden Postcard Show, Melbourne, VIC
2023
National Emerging Art Prize ACB Selects (online)
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tonivallance.com
