Exhibitions Melissa Boughey Step Outside 28th April 2026 - 16th May 2026

VIRTUAL TOUR

Flinders Lane Gallery is delighted to present Step Outside, Melissa Boughey’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Responding to her newly built studio, nestled at the edge of the wetlands on her family farm in the south-west of Western Australia, Boughey channels a renewed attentiveness to her surroundings into a stunning new series of richly layered, jubilant abstractions. Her works do not describe the landscape so much as translate its shifting energies: the criss-crossing of branches, the doubling of reflections across still water, and the chromatic recalibrations of light as the day unfolds. Closely composed and densely worked, each canvas becomes a site of movement and return, an image that holds the viewer in the charged space between observation and sensation.

"Both a plea to think outside the box (to reframe a thought, consider the bigger picture) and to physically ‘step outside’ (to see a new viewpoint, to move the body, experience a new perspective). I find this action, simple as it may seem, can shift a stuck thought and offer a pragmatic solution to a painting. When I step outside my studio, I see a shadow across a gravel path, a reflection of trees in the wetlands, a particular shade of golden summer, entwined tree branches.

My newly improved studio on the farm I have lived and worked for 30 years has provided me with a contented spaciousness, some room to move, and brought ease into my routine. The wetlands and paperbarks are more accessible; the treescape through one window allows many access points with changing light, and points of view.

There is a particular focal point where paperbarks plunge into the water, limbs akimbo, throwing shadows, with light piercing through the canopy, never static. This is drawing me in and holding my attention. The starting point before the tussle of paint begins, when it later becomes about the materiality of paint, surface, colour, tempo."
- Melissa Boughey 2026

Catalogue Essay by Phe Luxford, 2026
To step outside is to submit to a small, decisive reorientation. It is a bodily action, plain, almost unremarkable, yet it can undo the stubbornness of thought. For Western Australian artist Melissa Boughey, this movement is both pragmatic and philosophical: a plea to think beyond the habitual frame and an instruction to physically relocate, so that perception might be renewed. The paintings created for Step Outside are not depictions of landscape so much as the record of landscape’s capacity to reorient the self: to shift attention, recalibrate feeling, and exercise a state of alert presence.

Boughey has lived and worked on her farm in the lower regions of Western Australia for three decades. This long intimacy with place, and an awareness of its cultivated rhythms and unruly ecology, does not produce settled images. Instead, it sharpens her aptitude for changeability: observing the shifting fall of shadows cast across a gravel path and reflections within dense wetland foliage, where branches entwine and separate in a doubled, watery echo. These are not motifs to be translated literally. They are catalysts, brief optical and bodily events, that set the work in motion.

A recent studio relocation to a different section of her property has brought a new spaciousness into Boughey’s routine, offering room to move and a more immediate relationship to the wetlands beyond. Observing the landscape from her vantage point, her new studio windows serve as a threshold between inside and out, reframing what lies beyond, not as neat vignettes but rather as instructions: calling the artist to take up paper and paint and explore directly, to leave the studio and enter the world outside. In amongst the water and reeds she makes direct notes of what she observes there: light pierces, ricochets and dulls; paperbark branches emerge, sprawling from their verdant waters, throwing liquid shadows and glimmering shards that refuse to hold still. This is the exhibition’s quiet insistence: that a place is never static, and that attention, when granted fully, reveals endless revisions.

Boughey’s abstraction is built from this active looking. Like the loose plein air notations that form the early drafts of her image making, the resulting studio paintings continue this sense of ongoing adjustment, distilling a lived encounter rather than describing the literal. They translate the external sensations of the world outside into a visual language of tempo, surface, and colour. Gestural slabs and scraped passages suggest depth without reliance on perspective; forms collide, dissolve, and reassert. Transparent layers behave like memory: cumulative, permeable, allowing earlier incidents to remain visible beneath what comes later.

The viewer senses the artist’s ongoing negotiation with paint and its capacity for change, of painting as lived time, with all its revisions, hesitations, and sudden clarities. In pursuit of the essential, these artworks become a fused proposition: mind and matter, observation and feeling, enmeshed into one invigorated afterimage, gently freed from fixed thinking and opened to the possibilities found in the act of reorientation.

MELISSA BOUGHEY PROFILE
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Melissa Boughey
Late Afternoon Reset - tree-lined drive 2026
oil on canvas
135cm x 110cm , framed size 138 x 113cm

Melissa Boughey
Window View - golden light, dense foliage 2026
oil on canvas
135cm x 110cm , framed size 138 x 113

Melissa Boughey
Enraptured I - mossy shimmer 2026
oil on clear primed linen
75cm x 75cm , framed size 78 x 78cm

Melissa Boughey
Enraptured II - Fallen limb taken root 2026
oil on clear primed linen
75cm x 75cm , framed size 78 x 78cm

Melissa Boughey
Enraptured III - green and teal shadow 2026
oil on clear primed linen
75cm x 75cm , framed size 78 x 78cm

Melissa Boughey
After Canoe View - entwined branches 2026
oil on canvas
100cm x 90cm , framed size 103 x 93cm

$After Canoe View - fractured light path$

Melissa Boughey
After Canoe View - fractured light path 2026
oil on canvas
100cm x 90cm , framed size 103 x 93cm

Melissa Boughey
Faceted Form and an Improbable Flash of Light 2026
oil on clear primed linen
100cm x 90cm , framed size 103 x 93cm

Melissa Boughey
I Dreamt of Golden Limbs - in my mind's eye I step outside 2026
oil on clear primed linen
100cm x 90cm , framed size 103 x 93cm

Melissa Boughey
Angled Avenues of Paperbark Limb 2026
oil on linen
153cm x 153cm

Melissa Boughey
Wetlands Habitat - dark notes, light touches 2025
oil on linen
153cm x 153cm

Melissa Boughey
Step Outside - relinquishing previous plans 2026
oil on linen
153cm x 153cm