Design and Art Australia Online

Biography

Shelley Hannigan is a visual artist who originated from New Zealand and is now based in Victoria, Australia. In 1989, she completed a four year degree in fine arts from The University of Canterbury Artschool (Ilam) in Christchurch, New Zealand. Since this time she has been a practicing artist but has also trained and worked in the practices of Art therapy and art education.
She is a painter but images and material form that has emerged from the painting process has been explored with mixed media and sculpture.
Hannigan spent her first 18 years of life in Mt Cook, Wellington. Living in a quintessential Wellington house and growing up in central Wellington had a lasting impact on the kind of work she creates. It has an old-worldly feel inspired by the Edwardian architecture and ancestral stories and images that she lived amongst.
Extensive travel and living in different parts of the world is a reason for the predominant theme of place and identity in her work. This phenomenon was further investigated through her PhD candidature of 2010-2014. She investigated Place and Identity in her own work through autoethnographic writing and also conducted four narrative case studies of four artists who live in her current place that spaces Melbourne to Warrnambool.