Margie Sheppard - South Australian Printmaker and Painter
About the Artist
Margie Sheppard lives at Kangarilla, in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, where she works in her studio as a printmaker and painter. Her practice now spans 30 years. In that time she has spent a long period working exclusively as a printmaker, making large densely coloured etchings for which she has become well known. In recent years she has returned to oil painting and she is currently dividing her time between painting and printmaking. Both these practices hold different but equally strong attractions for her.
Margie graduated from the South Australian School of Art in Painting in 1974 and 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. She 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 bears 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
