fora / squared x miri badger

Miri Badger is a representational painter living and working in Meanjin/Brisbane. Utilising a highly-saturated colour palette and assertively flat brushstrokes to render form, her chosen subject matter stems from an investigation of uncanny human interaction and psyche. This is manifested in awkward scenarios played out in ambiguous space.

The amalgamation of seemingly mismatched objects and figures represented in ambiguous spaces culminates in a cocktail of pathos and eerie amusement in her paintings.

In 2019 Badger (b.1996) graduated with Honours in Fine Art at Queensland Collage of Art (Griffith University) and in 2017 from National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Art. Solo exhibitions include Divine Clutter at The Third Quarter Gallery in 2020, Umbra at Open House Gallery, Ménage at Studio W, and Noggin at 212 Blue. In addition to her solo exhibitions, Badger has participated in group shows such as ‘Botanics’ at Gala Galley and ‘Boiling Point’ at the Third Quarter Gallery. Alongside her traditional studio practice, Badger contributes her work to an array of human rights publications including Court of Conscience, and has created large scale mural works in Sydney and Melbourne.

Miri Badger presents FACES: a series documenting material experimentation in figurative representation. Distinctive combinations of material components are utilised in each portrait— choruses of pencil, crayon, pastel, oil paint, acrylic paint, and collage techniques are encouraged to coexist on canvas and wood panel. Playfully changing the ingredients of her works in this way has allowed for a plethora of textural qualities to be rendered via a stylised colour palette. Presenting faces as semi-abstracted movements of colour across a plane, these works reveal Badger’s experimentation with alternative representations of three-dimensional human form.

Badger's works occupied the space from mid-February to late March 2021.