Al Munro

Al Munro is an Australian artist, working in Canberra, the capital of Australia. She has a PhD in fine art from the Australian National University where she worked as a lecturer and post-graduate supervisor until 2018. 

Al works across the artistic disciplines of painting, drawing, textiles and sculpture. Her professional practice spans 25 years and she has exhibited regularly in Australia and overseas. She has undertaken residencies in Japan, London (UK) and Thailand, and these have been pivotal in her career and in her understanding of international contemporary art. 

Al’s concept focusses on pattern and colour, and investigates how these can structure and transform our understanding of form, space and time. Patterns are central to how we make sense of our world – from the conventions of language and mathematics to scientific discoveries such as weather patterns, fractal geometry and DNA.

Al explores visual patterns such as those from textile, ceramics and other decorative media as a visual analogy for the systems of knowledge that structure our comprehension of the world. She looks art movements such to Minimalism, Cubism, Geometric Abstraction and Concrete Art to inform her approach to art making. Her work often uses the grids and patterns of woven fabrics to critique the grids of modernist painting as well as to visualise the fundamental structures and knowledge that help us understand our world.