Kerry Shepherdson, Things and Thoughts, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
Kerry Shepherdson
Gallery 2
Opening Thursday 22 January, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 23 January - Sunday 15 February
Things inhabit our lives.
Thoughts inhabit our minds.
We curate ourselves, our homes, our desks, our gardens and our spaces with Things.
Things that are Thought to have resonance and impart solace and well-being,
Thoughts that recall, lived experience and knowledge -
Becoming a desire for STILLNESS away from Thoughts of chaos and rush
acquiescing to Thoughts of transience and rhythm in life and attention to Things.
The artist began to think about the things that are accumulated in life, for their practical and desired aesthetic value. They are collected and organised around us in meaningful ways. They tap into memories and experiences that come to emphasize the fast pace of time and relentless ongoing change in our world.
In an attempt to conceptually impede pace and change, the artist began paying attention to things inhabiting familiar spaces and to paint them, in compositions, sometimes in highly evocative ways, which relate to the age old Still Life genre. There is emphasis on form, colour, dimension, visual texture and pattern but the artist intentionally avoids the usual adherence to shadow and light source. Play with fluid paint and schematic brushwork reference her formative Chinese Brush painting training and life-long interest, having lived for many years as an expatriate.
About the Artist
Kerry completed her Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours in 2004 at the Australian National University School of Art, an EAAS and Alliance Francais award recipient, followed by her Master of Philosophy in 2011. Since, Kerry has had 4 solo exhibitions including Canberra Museum and Gallery/Nolan following a three month pilot artist residency, at the Lanyon Homestead Heritage Precinct. Currently a practicing studio artist, Kerry has been exhibiting interstate and overseas, including regular participation in ANU field studies in which artists are asked to respond to the environment.
Kerry Shepherdson explores abstraction in acrylic painting through complex, apparently chaotic but fundamentally ordered mechanisms of growth in nature, and more recently the perpetual undulating currents of the vast landscape of the oceans. A profound sense of history and human minutia and vulnerability in the scheme of things is a constant inspiration. Her underlying influences reference the arts and crafts of Asia and Africa where she lived for many years, particularly her opportunity to study in depth water colour and ink Chinese Brush painting.
Her works are multilayered and metaphorical, referencing systems developed in contemplative autonomic processes arriving at complex visual syntheses of colour and light, irregular pattern and compositions that allude to underlying geometry.