Hi, I’m Collette Quinlan.
I’m an Irish Australian contemporary abstract artist based in Melbourne.
I grew up in rural Ireland and have built my life in Australia. Belonging to both places has shaped the way I think about memory, identity, landscape and the environments we attach ourselves to.
For almost two decades, I’ve worked across design and the built environment in Ireland and Australia, alongside my painting practice. The two continue to inform each other, shaping the way I see material, scale, composition and the relationship between an artwork and the space around it.
But making began long before design.
It began at home, with a family of makers, natural materials, hands at work and an early fascination with how something made by another person could hold so much feeling.
That connection has followed me all the way here.
My Story
I’ve always made things.
I grew up in rural Ireland with my family. My mother, Mary Quinlan, the conductor of our particular little orchestra, somehow keeping us all moving together. My father, Patrick Quinlan, is a wicker weaver and painter.
My brothers, sisters and I grew up connected to his craft, helping with projects and surrounded by willow, earth, natural materials, old traditions and hands shaping things into existence.
There was something about objects made by hand that fascinated me. The irregularities. The texture. The mark of the person who made them.
That stayed with me.
I became obsessed with art early. I’d stay awake long after everyone else had gone to bed, drawing, painting and writing, trying to understand why a colour, surface or mark could make us feel something.
I studied Art and History of Art, completed a fine art portfolio course with ceramic artist Michelle Dempsey and worked in her studio before eventually studying Industrial Design.
When I left Ireland to build a life in Melbourne, I buried a box of those early drawings and paintings in a forest beneath the moss, soil and peat.
They’re still there.
There’s something about knowing that I love. A small part of an earlier version of me, held by the land I came from.
One day, I’ll go back for them.
I went on to build a career across Ireland and Australia in design, wayfinding and experience in the built environment. Almost two decades working with material, scale, composition, people and place have shaped the way I see, just as painting continues to shape how I approach design.
The two practices exist alongside each other. Different ways of thinking, making and responding, continually enriching one another.
Painting gives me space to work instinctively, where something can exist without needing to be solved.
Design gives me a deeper awareness of structure, context, scale and how people experience the spaces and objects around them.
Motherhood brought a new season of life, along with challenges I couldn’t have anticipated.
In 2025, while pregnant with my second child, a large tumour was discovered in my heart and I required urgent open heart surgery.
My daughter and I survived, but something shifted in me.
I stopped trying to keep everything contained.
Painting became more physical. I began building surfaces, burying marks, scraping them back, pressing into them, obscuring them and uncovering them again.
It became somewhere to put what I couldn’t always say.
Today my paintings explore memory, belonging, identity and release. What we hold within ourselves. The weight of responsibility. The layers we build to keep moving. What finds its way out. And what remains after experience changes us.
I work with acrylic, modelling paste, oil stick, charcoal, pencil, pastel and metallic elements, alongside scraps gathered from the environment around me. I build and erode surfaces until they begin to hold a history of their own.
I want the work to be felt before it’s understood. I want you to move closer because of the texture, the marks or light catching a surface. To notice where something has been buried and revealed again. And perhaps recognise something of your own story within it.
Maybe that’s what I’ve always been trying to do.
To give feeling a physical form.
Built. Buried. Revealed. Uncontained.
Irish rooted. Melbourne based.
Surface as Evidence
My paintings usually begin with a feeling rather than an image.
I work instinctively, allowing material, gesture and the surface itself to shape the composition. I use acrylic, texture medium, oil stick, charcoal, pencil, metallic elements and, at times, materials gathered from the environment around me.
I’m drawn to weathered surfaces, bark, stone, eroded ground and the irregular traces left by time. Not to reproduce them, but for the way they speak of change, pressure and what remains.
I don’t try to hide the process of making.
Paint is pushed, dragged and scraped back. Surfaces are built up, interrupted and worked into again. Marks appear, disappear and sometimes return in another form.
The surface records those decisions.
Dense areas of pigment and texture sit alongside more restrained space. Some marks remain contained. Others push beyond their boundaries.
That tension between control and release runs through the work.
The surface isn’t simply where the painting sits. It’s part of the story itself.
