Toni Vallance

Untitled 14/25, Acrylic and oil pigment stick on canvas on board, 38 x 30 cm, 2025

Toni Vallance

Top Shelf February 2026

Top Shelf: An in-house curated space for small artworks, rotated monthly.

Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, and currently based in Naarm Melbourne, Toni Vallance is an emerging visual artist specialising in layered, abstract mixed-media painting. Her practice explores colour, texture, and gesture as forces that exceed representation, engaging with feminist theories of embodiment, materiality, and intra-action.

This series of small works continues to explore Toni’s interest in abstraction as a physical, material process that emerges through embodied experience. Painting is seen as a dialogue between body and material, where gesture and matter shape meaning. Toni views painting as an entanglement, letting colour, texture, and movement develop their own rhythms rather than seeking to control them.

Edges and thresholds are key—moments when surfaces fray, pigments spill, and boundaries blur. The unpredictable nature of Toni’s materials, which stain, resist, and overflow, reflects the complexities of female lived experience and care. These gestures make colour a visceral force embodying memory, sensation, and emotion.

Through this exploration, painting serves as a site of resistance and renewal—a space where excess, chance, and affect are amplified, enabling new embodied understandings.