Artist's Statement

Melissa Boughey works from a converted farm-shed studio overlooking rehabilitated wetlands, drawing inspiration from the daily rhythms of a seasonal rural life. Her practice is grounded in landscape, shaped equally by these daily surrounds and by road trips taken during the vineyard’s fallow season — driving in a general direction, finding places to walk, camp and contemplate.

Observation, gathered through plein air excursions, anchors her practice of emotive drawing and gestural abstract oil painting. Gouache sketches, made early morning and dusk, capture her impressions in the moment: a visceral, absorbed response to place — the landscape buzzing, heat reflecting off rock, the pull of a distant treeline. These sketches later become emotional markers, informing the first tentative marks of a painting — a mapping of place. From there she abandons pre-conceived ideas, drawn instead to the materiality of paint and surface tension, responding to the push and pull of paint on surface and seeking out moments of surprise that move the work into unknown territory. In painting she finds a tussle, a cadence, between exertion and surrender — movement, control, a dance between effort and flow.

Her work moves between representational and abstracted forms that speak to containment and care, reflecting a reciprocal relationship with the natural world; she cares for the landscape and it nurtures her in turn. She follows curiosity rather than a fixed path, working at the intersection of what she already knows and what she newly encounters, seeking landscapes that feel like they are already part of her.