Sharmayne Grace McLean’s visual arts practice melts her own personal, lived experiences with the in-between blur of real and imagined worlds, sceneries and archetypes within pop cultures, sub-cultures and various folklores.

Her recent work is a process of investigating the materialisation and affect of such worlds through their reoccurring “motifs” which she perceives as psychological, cultural zeitgeists. These observations are emotionally, intuitively and politically considered before they are distilled into abstract sculptural “presences” as reflective, sensorial offerings.

Portrayals of landscapes depicted within film and digital media as alien, magical, futuristic or “exotic” places are reflected upon whilst considering the social aspects and interrelations between natural and superficial habitats, as well as costume, shields, weapons, and leisure & health devices within contemporary, day to day experiences both on and off screen. 

Sharmayne Grace McLean is an artist who dissects the phantasmagoric worlds of pop and subcultures in relation to her experiences of conflict and alienation whilst living within the intersecting margins of Australian society. Her process builds upon and deconstructs these encounters with the allegorical matter of cultural archetypes through their many shifting forms and media. She sets out to reassemble this archetypal matter as sculptural material, conveying their psychological nature into physical depiction of disfigurement, distortion and cartoonification, as well as their other, hardened mutations which grow beyond these states.

Exhibition Event – Saturday, 11 December, from 1pm

Presented by Incinerator Gallery and Hyphenated Projects.