JEDDA-DAISY CULLEY

Lucid Bodies brings together a compelling new series of paintings that explore the body as a transformative site of experience. Moving between figuration and abstraction, Culley’s paintings depict feminine figures in states of continual becoming, where memory, sensation, desire, and dreams shape and reshape the body.

Culley’s paintings inhabit a shifting and ambiguous space in which figures emerge, dissolve, and reform as emotional and psychological landscapes rather than fixed representations. Throughout the exhibition, womanhood and femininity are approached as an evolving presence. Figures drift through fields of colour like celestial bodies navigating invisible currents, their gestures carrying traces of intimacy, tenderness, vulnerability, pleasure, shadow, and transformation. The body becomes a threshold between self and environment, consciousness and sensation, reality and the imagined.

Drawing upon lived experience, emotional truth, and perception, Culley expands the possibilities of figurative painting. What initially appears as the human body gradually unfolds into a terrain of feeling, where memory, imagination, and personal experience converge. Guided by intuition and association, her paintings resist fixed narratives, allowing meaning to emerge through each viewer’s encounter with the work. Across the exhibition, the figure remains in a continual state of transformation. Bodies dissolve into landscapes and portals, gestures awaken memories, and paint itself becomes a vessel for poetic experience. Here, abstraction does not signal the disappearance of the figure but its expansion, enabling the body to exist beyond physical description and enter states of feeling, imagination and memory.

Jedda-Daisy Culley (b.1984) achieved her Master of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with First Class Honours from the University of New South Wales. Culley was selected as a Finalist in the 2025 Sir John Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, She was named a two-time Finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2022, 2021), a Finalist in the 66th Blake Prize (2021). Solo exhibitions include _Unbodied, _Ames Yavuz (2023), Sydney, _Download Hats, _Jerico Contemporary, Sydney (2022), And your mother’s psychic spaghetti river, Jerico Contemporary, Sydney (2021), Pls send pics this feels one~sided, Cement Fondu Project Space, Sydney (2021). In 2024 Culley exhibited in a duo exhibition titled, Parallel Parallel at Sainte Anne Gallery Paris. Notable recent group exhibitions include _Summer Salon The Voyage – See Our __Reality Anew, _CASSANDRA BIRD, Sydney (2025), _How to Swim, _curated by Sally Anderson at Edwina Corlette, Brisbane (2024), Telepathic Pikelet, Woollahra Gallery, Sydney (2022), _Summer _New 2022, James Makin Gallery, Melbourne (2022), and String Theory, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2013). Jedda-Daisy Culley has been collected by private collections and public institutions within Australia and abroad.