'Deep within, her paintings carry autobiographical elements heavy with memory and meaning...'
Sally Anderson’s work draws heavily on personal domestic, maternal, and relational experiences, as well as second-hand encounters with landscapes, to explore how meaning and memory are held, stored, and carried. She is particularly interested in the concept of ‘the souvenir’ and the ways we authenticate experiences and navigate notions of reality and truth.
Anderson recontextualizes and arranges personal and intimate experiences with art historical references to address how motherhood, domesticity, and creative practice are, for her, reciprocal and ultimately entangled. Her paintings deliberately oscillate between abstraction and representation, using still-life and landscape motifs as symbols of containment and care. Stella Rosa McDonald writes that Sally’s paintings are 'like wombs or libraries—where gestation and digestion are tacitly implied.'
Born in Lismore, Sally Anderson began her undergraduate studies in Visual Art at Southern Cross University before transferring to the College of Fine Art in Sydney. A past finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Paddington Art Prize, Anderson was invited to participate in the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists residency in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2014. In 2017 Sally Anderson won the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship administered by the Art Gallery of NSW and completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.