Shelley Hannigan

This was an exhibition in café. Having exhibited in galleries and then moved into community arts I was keen to try out exhibiting in spaces that are more accessible to the public. These were artworks created both in Geelong and during a residency at Bundanon, NSW.

Wind in the billows

Wind in the Billows is metaphoric of how time and place intersects with life. I wanted to capture how our journey through life can be sometimes as surprising as the way the wind might blow a dress. Being snared on the branch of a tree in Geelong, is how I feel having ended up living in Geelong myself after growing up in New-Zealand and living in many parts of the world. The colonial style dress was made with layers of steel wire mesh and painted with enamel paint to replicate linen. Colonial style encompasses my own identity with Australian and New-Zealand female ancestors, and the heritage aspects of Geelong. These are strong factors in me being able to have a connection to Place away from my homeland.

Untitled

This exhibition included 22 paintings. They were all expressionist, surreal paintings based on my experience of being a new Australian but reflecting at the same time on my other ‘home places’. These represent arts practice based research exploring identity and place.

Untitled

This exhibition included 28 paintings. They were curated around the theme of my perceptions of self and place from the experience of being a new-comer to Australia. Evident in the works are imaginative Australian landscapes, with references to my prior home of Bruges, Belgium and ancestors who had been in Australia.

Paintings and drawings

This exhibition was an opportunity to create more work based around the theme of aquatic and land environmental issues that had been so well received at my 1991 exhibition at Rita Webster Gallery in Auckland. I developed large drawings and paintings as diptychs for this exhibition also.

Paintings

This was my first solo exhibition since completing art school. It was a collection of paintings and drawings which were all diptychs of people and fish. It was a commentary on how New-Zealanders dwell on the edge of sea and land and the environmental concerns we have for species of aquatic and land environments.

Home : recent paintings by Shelley Hannigan

This exhibition represents a year or so of practice in which much flatter space is explored with colour line and gesture, than in works before. Four paintings in this exhibition are abstract colour-field studies with the remaining 12 being large gestural figurative/abstract works. This exhibition is a study into some of the key metaphors that have been explored in previous works such as the symbolic meaning of birds and themes of child-play.

Paintings 2002

This exhibition followed an artist in residency at Marsden College, Wellington. During this residency, she engaged in a project of creating paintings from memories and imagination rather than plein-air or other reference material. The paintings and drawings became layered images from different sources culminating in essence images about her identity and experience with the Place that is Wellington.

Shelley Hannigan paintings

This exhibition was a part of Geelong’s Momenta! Arts Festival which showcased the arts in Geelong.  Exhibitions were held in shops, galleries, cafes and private residences. My exhibition was held in the Fiona Pickering photographic studio and showroom (now Beavs Bar). Key themes of these works were time, Place and identity.

After the flood

This drawing belongs to a suite of original drawings in watercolour on the theme of 'the flood', forming a commentary on Australian contemporary history.
2 panel watercolour on arches

Bondi Beach NSW, 28 May 2011, 11:06

This artwork is the result of the curators’ premise to invite an artist or artists to produce an initial image according to a brief. These initial images were then given to photographers to respond to and re-interpret the initial image. The curators produced a broadsheet publication and an online document cataloguing the works.