MARGIE SHEPPARD

Margie Sheppard lives in the Adelaide hills in South Australia where she works in her studio as a printmaker and painter.Her practice now spans 30 years and in that time she has spent a long period working exclusively as a printmaker making often large densely coloured etchings for which she is well known . She is currently dividing her time between painting and printmaking. Both these practices hold for her different but equally strong attractions.
Margie graduated from the South Australian School of Art in Painting in 1974,has taught in the TAFE system early in her career. She has had more than twenty solo exhibitions both in South Australia and interstate. She has also exhibited in New Zealand, Slovenia, Mexico, Korea and the USA and has been selected for a number of important print exhibitions such as the Fremantle Print Award and is also a three times winner of The Whyalla Art Prize Print Award.
Margie's images derive from personal, symbolic, figurative imagery such as water, fish, boats, horses, houses, figures layered with landscapes and sky states that are configured in such a way as to convey a dream like quality that bares little relationship to literal visual experience.

"I would like the viewer to feel or recognise something that exists just below the level of consciousness, something that links with their own dreams or personal images. Each person's interpretation will be as different as one person is from another, but hopefully there will also be a meeting place- a sense of universality." Margie Sheppard

"Sheppard's ideas evolve as powerful visual statements that accentuate the dreamlike atmosphere of their origins. Her intelligent, emotional use of colour, ambiguity of form and the combination of imagination with the practicality of process create a visual language that acts directly on the viewer's senses."

- Judith Bruton, PhD Art & Design.