Miranda Parkes

Overview

In Miranda Parkes work, painting steps off the traditional flat canvas and becomes three-dimensional object. Best known for her scrunched canvases, she works across a range of substrates including canvas, paper, timber pallets, book pages, plastic tiles but never stretched flat canvas. Painting itself, rather than the surface on which it sits, has primacy and colour is foregrounded - often glorious fluro colours, golds and silvers. 

Underpinning her surfaces is a play with depth, layering and two and three dimensionality to explore what abstract painting can be. Flat canvases are not part of her repertoire. Scrunched up ‘voluptuous’ canvases have become her signature.

The artist talks to painting as a discipline - exploring and disrupting its conventions and histories to deliver on her intention to offer viewers “a clear-minded, joyful and reflective space.”

Art historian De Kirsty Baker has described her work as as an exuberant rebuttal of the earnest pared-back formalism of modernist abstraction... Her maximalist approach results in a show which offers a joyful wink to the artifice of any dominant art-historical narrative.


Bio

Parkes completed a Master of Fine Arts with Distinction at the University of Canterbury in 2008. She joined Bartley & Company Art in 2021 with an impressive pedigree: more than 20 solo exhibitions, over 50 group exhibitions and numerous awards and residencies including Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, the Olivia Spencer Bower Award, a Tylee Cottage artist residency and the William Hodges Fellowship.