Featured Artist Lisa McKimmie Artist’s Statement

Lisa McKimmie is a visual artist living and working in Sydney, on unceded land traditionally owned by the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. She is primarily a painter with a studied emphasis on sustainability in all aspects of art practice, and her most recent solo exhibition was at Flinders Street Gallery, Surry Hills, in May 2023.

 McKimmie acknowledges that the notion of sustainable art practice is both conundrum and burden at this critical juncture in history. She first studied Organic Chemistry, Botany and Zoology in the Science faculty at UWA before turning to art. Consequently, her work embodies an interest in, and consciousness of, the chemicals and material elements, the role they play in the history of art, and this furthers her questioning of the ways in which art and its objects may be vital to our cultural histories and identities.

 A graduate of WAAPVA, Edith Cowan University, The National Arts School, Sydney; she has a Masters from the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW as well as a Postgraduate Diploma in Education from Monash University. She has worked in the contemporary gallery sector, as a tertiary art lecturer and a studio-based teacher. She has traveled extensively, including in Australia, Asia and Europe, practicing for substantial periods of time in different landscapes and cultures, often making her own paint and drawing materials. She lived for many years in the Hague, in the Netherlands, and during the pandemic had a studio in the forests on the edge of The Hague.

 Increasingly working in abstraction, McKimmie still explores figurative subjects in drawing and particularly in portraiture, which has always been a component of her practice. She has been a four-time exhibitor in the Portia Geach Prize, and in 2022 was a semi-finalist for the Doug Moran Portrait Prize. Additionally many works have been shortlisted and hung in major awards and prizes around Australia including the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Grace Cossington Smith Art Award, Blacktown City Art Prize, Calleen Art Prize, Paddington Art Prize and the inaugural National Capital Art Prize.

In early 2023 Lisa McKimmie accompanied a scientific expedition from the University of Brunei Darussalam into the jungles of Borneo both as a volunteer in a group carrying out a Fresh Water Fish Biodiversity Survey and as an artist. This expedition will inform the next group of works to be shown at Flinders Street Gallery, Surry Hills, Sydney, in a joint exhibition with landscape painter, Fiona Sommerville. In the second half of 2024 the gallery will present McKimmie’s next solo exhibition.

Lisa McKimmie can be found on-line at  https://myaz-b.com/.

Images courtesy Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney

  

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