Darwin Boy, 2024

The character is a common muse for the artist who uses the figure to express herself with colour, form and texture. Darwin Boy is a painting on a patterned metal surface, the material salvaged from Reverse Garbage (Sydney’s Reuse Centre), recycling is important to Connolly in her work. A trip to Darwin with her family inspired the lush green palm trees and the boy in the foreground resembles her son with a playful colour palette. The repetition of marks in the metal surface area provides a rhythm to the work, which the oil paint plays off. Golden light is drawn into the area with generous oil stick, the tonal contrast with the purple and green in the boy’s body gives him a strong presence.

Michelle Connolly is a mixed-media painter and sculptor. Michelle’s practice fledged while living in North Carolina, USA where she immersed herself in visionary folk art, primitive and outsider art.
Improvisation, play, and harnessing of her own unique, authentic raw energy are critical elements of Michelle’s open and organic approach to making. In her studio, Michelle develops multiple works simultaneously in a prolific and generous manner that creates order from chaos through intuitive experimentation. As each mark or material is responded to and each work develops, it triggers the next step to sustain Michelle’s internal dialogue with her work.
Michelle’s assembled sculptural works are often held together with wire that at once binds together and creates their visceral tenderness and vulnerability and is also evident in her two-dimensional works where spontaneous, authentic mark-making creates characters of human and animal fragility.
Michelle now lives and works in Sydney, Australia.