There can be few studios so immaculate as that of Marion Borgelt. Some artists have to make a mess before they feel comfortable, but Borgelt likes to clear the decks, both physically and mentally.

Her studio is in Chippendale, in inner-city Sydney. She arrives at nine in the morning, and will work until to seven-thirty or eight in the evening. "First I listen to the answering machine, then I turn on the computer and get my emails.. Because I've been working recently with industrial designers and consultants there are always questions that need to be answered. If I don't deal with these things first, I'm not ready for the physical work of the studio. I have to feel fairly empty. I can't have a load on my mind."

Twenty years ago, Borgelt was known as a gestural painter, a maker of complex abstract canvases. In those days, the gesture came first. "It was like a dance, she says. Your body goes into a mode, creating a lattice-work of movement. It all gets tied together and becomes a series of tessellated forms, but now it's so different. It's planned and considered. There's little room for gesture, apart from my preliminary sketches, which are things I could never exhibit."

Her most recent work is displayed on the white walls of the studio - shallow relief forms: discs, ellipses, shields and pods in dramatic tones of red and black. Leaning against another wall are four panels with strips of white canvas spliced and twisted to tease the eye with a glimmer of pale yellow. A set of waxy, lumpen forms sits on the ground, looking like mushrooms under protective plastic. Borgelt's work is inspired by a range of organic and manmade forms, but there is always a sensuous, feminine dimension.

"Technically they're not just paintings because there's very little flat work involved," she says. "Most pieces interface between sculpture and painting, and some of them are completely off the wall.. If I can sum up and understand my own core interests, I'm after a view of the cosmos - star-like formations and light-play in all its detail - shadows, filtered light and optics."

Unlike many painters, Borgelt is not frightened of the word "design". It is, in fact, the integral first step for all her work. She will turn the design into a maquette, and then get an assistant skilled in carpentry to make the low-relief forms over which the canvas is stretched. She then returns to the work to apply the paint or wax.

This structured approach has led Borgelt to embrace large-scale public commissions, designing pieces to be made from sandstone or stainless steel, or even from crop plantings. She relishes the challenge of a new type of space, a new surface texture. She loves the unexpected things she discovers when a commission forces her to think in a different way.

Borgelt believes that the size of an artist's studio can influence the scale of her work, but the deeper, more important changes come from within. "You may have exhausted something you've been pursuing, or you've been through some vast emotional upheaval. But each work of art still has to have its essential integrity, and that's a matter for my own powers of critical assessment and logic."

When she reaches the end of a series, Borgelt will pause and step aside for a moment. "There always have to be times for a reappraisal of where you're going," she says. "It would surprise me a lot if an artist didn't do that."

John McDonald

View the full list of artists photographed by R. Ian Lloyd