Artist profile
Tali
Tali Steer is an abstract artist based in Victoria’s Alpine region. Her practice is guided by intuition, drawing on movement, gesture, and spontaneous mark-making. Inspired by nature and the subconscious, she uses colour as a way to capture emotion and create expressive visual landscapes. Through her work, she explores symbols, rituals, and energy, offering a contemporary reflection on how we experience and feel the world around us.
Working predominantly as a painter, clay, wood, and natural dyes also play a part in her practice. Influenced by transcendental, abstract, and Indigenous Australian artists. Tali often begins her process with movement, breathwork, and elemental rituals such as a smoke cleanse, bush walk, or river swim, creating an embodied gateway into her automatic studies. In place of inherited sacred symbols, she has developed a personal symbolic system—an evolving expression of energy and memory explored through movement, visualization, and connection with nature.
Career Highlights
- Finalist 2025 Wollongong Art Prize
- Solo Exhibition – Spirit Trees, Brunswick Street Gallery (2024)
- Profiled in New Art Magazine, Italy. Issue 6
Artist Interview
What medium do you work with, and why have you chosen them?
I am predominantly a painter, I work with oils and acrylic. I love abstraction and transcendental imagery that comes from what is felt. I also move between clay and natural dye but really, these materials for me are interesting and organic surfaces and form to paint on.
How does your artwork get from initial concept to exhibition stage?
My process begins in my haphazard mind full of conceptual imagery released in sketchbooks, sigils on shower glass, scribbling down all my thoughts. In my studio I work across sometimes 10–15 paintings at once, exploring ideas loosely until connections reveal themselves. As certain pieces resolve, I recognize the underlying concept and refine the collection. Often a new body of work emerges alongside the original, a peculiar unfolding that I just go with and it shapes the final works ready for exhibition.
Can you tell us a little more about your creative working environment/studio?
I live by the river in Wangaratta with my son, in a small, old 2 bedroom cottage where my work often spills through the house. I’ve turned one bedroom with good natural light into my studio which means for now I sleep in the open living space, my cat and dog have claimed that space too. On the porch sits an ancient and very heavy pottery wheel for hand-building in warmer months, and in the backyard an old table for making frames and preparing the boards I paint on. The kitchen is sometimes overtaken with cauldrons of natural dye pots. I love that my studio is in my home, allowing me to pick up where I’ve left off at any time.
