The Art of Surface

Texture and Colour in Spatial Design

Angelina Mirabito & Samuel Galloway

15 May – 6 June 2025

The Art of Surface emerged from a deeply personal and spatially reflective practice shaped by stillness, recovery, and the observation of light. For over a decade, Mirabito lived largely immobile or unable to leave her front door. In that time, the white walls surrounding her became both constraint and canvas, a site for observing how space holds, shapes, and communicates with the body and mind.

A formative chapter unfolded in a Coburg townhouse during the COVID lockdowns: an artist’s home filled with books, art, and intentional design. It revealed how profoundly the aesthetic and spatial environment can affect mental and emotional wellbeing, a revelation previously only experienced within studio settings. Later, from the 56th floor of a high-rise apartment, Mirabito experienced a renewed sense of safety and possibility. The spatial design and considered interiors became catalysts for movement beyond the paralysis of complex trauma, demonstrating how design can transform not just how we function, but how we are, how we feel, exist, and connect.

Grounded once more, literally, she turned attention to the surfaces beneath her: floorboards, tiles, and improvised materials. Through this, texture emerged as an interface between body, space, and mind.

Created in response to Melbourne Design Week’s theme, ‘Design the world you want’, the exhibition explored how subtle shifts in texture, light, and colour can alter perception and lived experience. A series of five works, Alter, Cosmic Recurrence, Tomorrow’s Door, Echo, and Becoming, form a quiet manifesto of transformation.

Developed in collaboration with filmmaker, Samuel Galloway, the project extended into video art, photo and light installation. Centred on the motif of the moth, a symbol of transformation and instinctive movement toward light, Galloway’s work offered a poetic counterpoint: a meditation on change, embodiment, and renewal.

The exhibition was realised during Mirabito’s artist residency at The Gladstone, home to Romulus Folio Gallery, with practical support from Scott Ross. Working within a transitional space, one power point, no sink, a pre-existing mural, the artists embraced constraint as creative stimulus. Supported by The Gladstone / FB Ideas and proudly auspiced by Arts Access Victoria, the exhibition foregrounded light, texture, and lived experience as foundations for both design and healing.

Created across Southbank and South Melbourne, on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, this work acknowledges the enduring lineage of spatial knowledge, texture, and storytelling held in Country for countless generations.

The Art of Surface is an inquiry into the tactile, emotional, and psychological surfaces that shape how we live. It asks how we design the world, and how, in turn, we allow it to hold us.