Courtney McClelland is an emerging artist based in Eora, Sydney, Australia. She engages with a variety of paint media, using paint stains to generate bodily compositions that she layers using both thick textural marks and soft glazes into large, amorphous scenes. Her paintings negotiate between figuration and abstraction, evoking themes of violence, intimacy, community, and loss. Creating impressions of scenes, her works step into a liminal, psychological space that are a response to both the paint on the surface and the social conditions around her. Her work responds to ideas of power, social ritual and feminine experience. Her indeterminate figures are searching for meaning in a crumbling landscape and embracing in tentative connection while surrounded in disorder.
Courtney was born in Central Queensland and grew up in several mining towns before moving to the Northern Rivers as a teenager. She moved to Sydney in 2018 where she studied English Literature before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School in 2022, majoring in painting. Her work has been exhibited in Sydney, Australia, and is held in private collections across the country. Her short fiction ‘Skinhug’ was published in Voiceworks Magazine (2019). She is currently working out of a studio in Rozelle, Sydney.