Irene Wellm - 'Devils I Have Known'

Irene Wellm’s practice is driven by an internal world of dreams, fairy tales and mythology, anchored by and explored through Jungian psychological differentiation (bringing the unconscious into consciousness). Her current work uses the childhood trope of paper dolls, mimicking collage to communicate a multi-layered expression of the self in flux between light and dark. The paintings are ambiguous, using playful and surreal concepts along with realist technique to create symbolic maps of the personal psyche.

Irene Wellm completed an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001. She has held more than fifteen solo and thirty group exhibitions across Australia since 1987, and internationally in the United Kingdom, Korea and Germany. In 2012 she was awarded the New Works Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts to do research and a nine-month residency in Leipzig, Germany. Two further residencies and a solo exhibition followed (2014/15), supported by an Australia Council Visual Arts Travel Fund. She has been a consistent finalist in a number of art prizes, most recently the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2014). Her work was curated into Towards Colour by Robert Lindsay at McClelland Gallery (2002) and into Glacier by Suzanne Davies at R.M.I.T. Gallery (2001). Internationally, she represented Australia as one of three artists in the UBS Art Award, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2000). Her works are represented in the collections of ArtBank, the Ballarat Regional Gallery, the City of Darebin Art Collection, La Trobe University and Stockwell Downs; and in private collections in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.A.