MICHELLE USSHER
AustraliaMichelle Ussher’s practice is motivated by an ongoing interest in how an image, form or sound can communicate the subjective and conditional nature of perception. With an emphasis on the handmade, represented through luscious oil paintings, watercolours and oils on paper, and glazed ceramics, her highly evocative works oscillate between figurative and abstracted imagery. Their fraught surfaces and half-materialised forms produce a sense of history entangled with the effects of imagination and the unconscious. Ussher’s works often scrutinise the world of intimacy, to decolonise and reimagine historic and symbolic Western representations of female identity and sexuality.
Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2002, Ussher’s work has exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and the USA. In 2021 she completed a Masters of Aesthetics and Art Theory, supervised by Catherine Malabou at the Centre of Research in Euro- pean Philosophy, Kingston University. She has undertaken artist residencies at the Cité Interna- tional des Arts (2008), the Australia Council for the Arts London Studio (2009), the British School at Rome (2015) the Acme Fire Station, London (2015-2020) and West Dean College (2020-21). She received an Arts Council England international development grant (2016) to undertake the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Phasmid residency in Berlin, and an Australia Council for the Arts mid-career development grant to undertake research in Greece (2014), which led to her significant solo exhibition Yellow eyes burn and Return at TarraWarra Museum of Art (2014).
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