MARINA ROLFE is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice explores abstraction through slow, layered processes of attention and material response. Working primarily in oil, her paintings develop through accumulation, erasure, and reworking, allowing the image to shift gradually over time.
The paintings begin from fragments, traces of landscape, a memory of light, a sense of spatial orientation, and gradually move away from these starting points. Forms emerge and recede within the surface, often held in a state between abstraction and recognition. Her process is guided by a sustained engagement with the material behaviours of paint, where each mark alters the conditions of the next. Rather than constructing predetermined images, Rolfe approaches painting as a process of negotiation with the surface, responding to the work as it develops. This allows the paintings to form their own internal logic, where decisions are made through attention, restraint, and repetition.
Rolfe is currently a research candidate at the University of Melbourne. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her work is held in the Artbank collection and private collections.
For more information, please visit Marina Rolfe’s website here.