Courtney McClelland navigates the complicated experience of existing within a body — the restlessness under the skin, the poetics of sensation. Familiar in its form yet multifarious in its translations, the body is a repository of histories, desires, intimacies, and vulnerabilities that articulate our corporeal being. Sometimes celebratory, sometimes escapist, McClelland’s figures reveal their connective tissue through immortalised moments of tenderness within the mutters of unhurried gaiety.

McClelland’s bodies emerge through a process of excavation as she paints, digging out their limbs, rendering their curves, and reassembling their bodily forms to build her compositions. Each work begins with layers of acrylic stain before unearthing bodily forms from the traces left by washes and pigment. Developing her paintings through a combination of fluid acrylic washes and thick, textural oil paint, McClelland tempers her bold, gestural mark-making at the edges, arriving at a result that appears gentle and soft.

The figures that emerge are supplemented with references to Baroque painters, Victorian-era fairies, and Bacchanalian scenes; their rituals, brawls, hedonistic revelry, and languorous splendour kindle a sense of undulating movement across the canvas. Intertwined and spilling into surrounding earthly spaces, McClelland’s figures appear tangled within the paint as she grapples with her materials, the figures, and the stories she seeks to tell. Her bodies are drawn from a collision of desire and rage, often in battle with the landscape around them — suspended, entangled in eddies, blurring into the sky, and mulching into the ground. She uses these physical sensations to make sense of visceral ones.

Some works suggest a single body unravelling, while others reveal gentle exchanges hidden in plain sight. At times, the figures collapse into each other; at others, they fall headfirst, arms flailing. Informed by the painting process, there is often a critical point at which a story begins to emerge — a small gesture that hints at a wider narrative: an arched back, arms connecting, eyes locking. “It’s the tenderness that I’m drawn to,” says McClelland, “these incidental moments that the rest of the work grows from.”

Negotiating between themes of romance, fantasy, and desire, McClelland explores the vulnerability in the rendering of flesh alongside the instinctual, complicated feelings it incites — everything from lust to horror. Her otherworldly scenes stumble between memories and dreams, seeking out moments in the paint that are both ephemeral and eternal.

“As I paint, I feel both nostalgic for something I haven’t known, and as though I am seeking something ethereal that exists outside my familiar world,” says McClelland. “The figures in my paintings move in and out of focus with each other. They are huddled together, unravelling, and reaching towards each other. I aim to position the bodies I paint as empowered forms, punctuated by care, frenzy, and whimsy.”