Shelley McKenzie returns to Boom for her seventh solo exhibition, Still Life. This body of work marks a significant lifestyle change for Shelley as she made the move from the expansive countryside of Anakie to the built-up landscape of a Bellarine Peninsula town.

Shelley’s paintings reflect her immediate surroundings, exploring her new home and the contrast of intrigue and strangeness as she finds her feet here. These works explore the interplay of light and shadow as the surfaces are fragmented in a celebration of colour.

ARTIST STATEMENT

"Time and space moves through all of us and these pieces have emerged from a dislocation and relocation and attempt to see a new. The process of being with the materials, the kind absorption offered in the making and the curious end product have been grounding.

The work explores the home - a 1970s time capsule of wood paneling, laminex and arches. In focus is the play of light on surfaces and the rippling shadows cast on the walls by garden foliage. This place offers wide open spaces to look upon as well as the paraphernalia of suburban life - and that creatively rich but uncomfortable place where one’s feet are not quite on the ground but paddling furiously to keep afloat."

BIO

Shelley McKenzie studied Art and Art Therapy. Her practice is underpinned by the therapeutic benefits of the process of making art and it’s capacity to mobilise the entire being. From the rhythmic, tactile, sensual act of using materials to the manifestation of images, symbols and emotions, art making can unlock information that renders words superfluous.  Indeed it is a kind of medicine for the soul.

Her work focuses on her home and the natural environment. Objects, real and imagined are organised on the space of the canvas, integrating form, pattern, texture and shadow. The work is a holding place for the seen, physical environment and emotional geography. Colour is used in a celebratory way through the layered push and pull of paint, ink, markers and oil sticks.

She has recently moved to the coast and is beginning to explore the expansive sky and water juxtaposed with the built suburban environment.

Her work is represented in private and public collections.