Michelle Ussher’s practice is motivated by an ongoing interest in how an image, form or sound can communicate the subjective and conditional nature of perception. With an emphasis on the handmade, represented through luscious oil paintings, watercolours and oils on paper, and glazed ceramics, her highly evocative works oscillate between figurative and abstracted imagery. Their fraught surfaces and half-materialised forms produce a sense of history entangled with the effects of imagination and the unconscious. Ussher scrutinises dominant perspectives of feminine symbols found in Western European thought and its art-objects, in order to decolonise representations of feminine sexuality and re-contextualise marginalised creative ways of being. By mingling personal mythologies with philosophical, psychoanalytic and spiritual ones, hierarchical boundaries mutate for reimagining visual and sonic configurations of bodily subjectivity.

Ussher has shown nationally and internationally in a breadth of solo and group presentations, most notably, Territories of the Imaginal, Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (2025); Michelle Ussher, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (2019); The Green Ray, Wilkinson, London (2016); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013); Gertrude Edition, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne (2011); SV10: Members show, Studio Voltaire, London (2010); Too Near Too Far, Care/of Contemporary Art Centre, Milan (2007); and What would I know I only live here, Room 103, Auckland (2006).

She has undertaken artist residencies with Stonehouse/Glasshouse, France (2026); FranceWest Dean College, Westdene (2020-21); the Acme Fire Station, London (2015-2020); the British School at Rome (2015); the Australia Council for the Arts London Studio (2009); and the Cité International des Arts (2008). She received an Arts Council England international development grant in 2016 to undertake the Victorian College of the Arts Phasmid residency in Berlin; and an Australia Council for the Arts mid-career development grant to undertake research in Greece in 2014, which led to her significant solo exhibition Yellow eyes burn and Return at TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville (2014).

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