Collette Quinlan Archives - Gallery Unbound

Collette Quinlan

Collette Quinlan is an Irish born, Melbourne based abstract artist and designer whose work is rooted in making, place and the physical language of feeling. She grew up in rural Ireland in a family of makers, surrounded by people who worked with their hands. Her father, Patrick Quinlan, was a wicker weaver and painter, and making was part of everyday life. Materials were shaped, worked and transformed. Things were made slowly and by hand, with the marks of the maker left visible. Collette drew and painted from childhood, studied Art and History of Art and later completed a fine art portfolio course, working in the studio of Irish ceramic artist Michelle Dempsey. Before leaving Ireland for Melbourne, she buried a box of her early drawings and paintings in a forest beneath the moss, soil and peat. It remains there. She went on to study Industrial Design and has spent almost two decades working across Ireland and Australia in design, wayfinding and the built environment. Her design practice is centred on user experience, how people connect to place, and how thoughtful design can shape the way a space is understood, navigated and felt. That sensitivity to place, material and human experience has always carried through her work. The maker never disappeared. It simply found other forms. After surviving life threatening heart surgery in 2025, Collette returned to painting with a different urgency. Making was no longer something to fit around the edges of life. It became a need. A place to release what could no longer stay contained and a way of taking something internal and giving it weight, texture and physical form. That instinct shapes how she paints. Working with acrylic, texture mediums, oil stick, charcoal, pencil and metallic elements, Collette builds surfaces through layering, burying, scraping and exposing. She is drawn to bark, stone, eroded earth, worn edges and surfaces altered by weather and time. Marks disappear beneath later layers and sometimes emerge again. Nothing is completely erased. Her paintings explore the tension between holding on and letting go, between containment and release. The process is physical because the feeling behind it is physical too. Material is pushed, dragged, covered and uncovered until the painting begins to hold something that words cannot. For Collette, painting is not separate from where she came from, the life she has lived or the work she has done as a designer. Both practices are concerned with how people experience place, how meaning can be held in material, and how something felt can be made physical. It connects the child drawing in rural Ireland, the family of makers, the designer, the woman who left home, and the artist who found her way back to making. In Collette’s works, the surface becomes evidence of what happened. A physical record of feeling.

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Collette Quinlan

Acrylic paint, oil stick, pencil, metallic acrylic painted elements on Stretched canvas

60 x 80 cm

$800.00

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Full Feeling

Collette Quinlan

Acrylic and mixed media, oil stick, pastel, charcoal, varnish, metallic acrylic elements on Stretched canvas

40 x 50 cm

$500.00

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Collette Quinlan

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Full Feeling