Colleen’s paintings represent the physical act of painting and the inner calmness that occurs when she paints. Her practice is guided by a process driven approach as she explores the relationship between surface and paint, with subconscious thought, chance and spontaneity playing vital roles. Balancing landscape and abstraction, her paintings reflect personal narratives and a deep engagement with place.

In the making of her paintings, she expresses something that is felt rather than observed and explores texture, colour, collage and intuitive marks that reference memory and her lived experience.

Colleen studies how things sit in relationship to each other. She is drawn to salvaged surfaces to work on, which bear traces of their history. She builds a narration of production – a collaboration between making and materials with the artwork holding the world as she experienced it, connecting her to the feelings of a time and place.

Currently completing a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University and entering her second year, Colleen Guiney is a practising artist who divides her time between Gunditjmara Country / Port Fairy on the south-west coast of Victoria and Melbourne, spending half of each week in both places. This dual existence informs her practice and charges her work with contrasting experiences she can draw on. Colleen has exhibited widely, including solo shows at Boom Gallery, Geelong (2017–25) and Michael Reid Northern Beaches (2022–24). Career highlights include solo exhibitions at Pigment Gallery in the Nicholas Building (2009) and First Site Gallery, RMIT (2009). She has also been a finalist in the Lethbridge Landscape Art Prize (2021), the Cambridge St Gallery Life Abstracted Art Prize (2019), and the Williamstown and Waverley Art Prizes. Alongside her partner, Colleen operates Drift House, an award-winning small hotel known for its design aesthetic, where her work is woven into the interiors, including two feature murals.