Jan Murphy Gallery is pleased to present ‘Flowers’, the new exhibition from Melbourne-based artist Claudia Greathead. Claudia Greathead’s latest body of work continue the artists personal journey and exploration of the world around her. Her work blurs the line between figurative and abstraction, reality and dreams, memory and feelings, creating a visual language for Greathead to explore and understand her inner and outer world. These intimate paintings invite the viewer into the artists world and encourage us to slow down, contemplate and reflect.

“The process of creating enables me to understand and resolve inner emotional states and to navigate new experiences. Through the process of painting, my feelings are externalised, the image or canvas acts as a mirror and I can then see my inner world on the outside. The process of art making has enabled me to feel my feelings, to notice my body and to heal. Things that seem to be left un-noticed can reveal themselves in a painting.

Subjects such as flowers, insects, or eery landscape scenes, validate feelings, show a felt sense in the world, and support a feeling and knowing of belonging. This body of work is using art to find meaning, to be more present and to notice and admire. By painting flowers means to see and understand (or hope to understand) softness, fragility, beauty, kindness, strength, openness and love, and to know that these qualities are always here in the world.” Claudia Greathead – 2021

Born in Brisbane in 1993 and now based in Melbourne, Claudia Greathead is a graduate of Queensland College of Art and is currently completing a Masters of Art Therapy at La Trobe University, Melbourne. In recent years Greathead has been a finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and is a two-time finalist in the Churchie Emerging Art Prize.

Image credit: Claudia Greathead, Yellow flowers and butterflies, 2021, oil on linen, 41.0 x 51.0 cm (detail)