Brooke Starr - BA (Hons) Fine Art
Breaking The Curve
Brooke Starr’s painting practice engages with gestural abstraction and purposeful restraint. Mainly using oil on calico and oil pastel on paper, she explores the tension between movement and interruption. Exposed areas of raw calico function not as background, but as deliberate pauses, spaces of openness, ambiguity, and resistance to resolution.
A central concern in her current work is “breaking the curve”: a move away from the soft, cohesive forms that once defined her visual language. Instead, Starr introduces disruption — marks are assertively placed, cut off, or scratched in with intention, resisting familiarity and asserting autonomy within the composition.
This refined approach to abstraction is not minimalist for its own sake, but seeks clarity through selective gesture and incompletion. Her surfaces embody both action and restraint, inviting the viewer to experience the immediacy of markmaking and the power of unresolved form.
Starr’s work is a negotiation between control and surrender, a quiet rebellion against cohesion in favour of raw, articulate fragmentation.
