Abbey McCulloch

Abbey McCulloch (an Australian artist born in 1957) is a self-confessed "magazine addict" who reckons society is saturated with images of glamorous women.

The 29-year-old is challenging this "completely unbalanced" representation of females through her quirky caricatures of women that capture instead the "complexities and contradictions" of the fairer sex - warts and all.

"I prefer to capture women when they're at their most vulnerable. My girls (as she likes to call her caricatures) are more real . . . They're pretty much an unaware depiction of what I am and then, I guess, what I see," she says.

And McCulloch sees a lot - she spends plenty of time hanging around shopping centres, cafes and bars, observing women and looking for inspiration for her paintings. She often has a camera on hand ready to capture that awkward or vulnerable moment.

"I look for awkward locations such as shopping malls and cafes, places where people reveal their vulnerabilities. These places make for great psychological landscapes where people are thrust into situations, where judgements are being made, where they are manufacturing roles and putting up defences," says McCulloch, who studied fine art at the Queensland College of Art.

"I have 12 cameras and I like to take photos as much as I can without being too intrusive or intimidating. Photography is a natural part of the process. It's the beginning of it all." She then transfers the images to canvas with her trademark sketches.

"Her paintings are really quirky and funky and out there, but she's still using traditional and beautiful drawing components and combining them with traditional painting components," says Helen Gory from Helen Gory Galerie, which is hosting McCulloch's latest exhibition, I Miss You Most of All.

McCulloch's "girls" are depicted in everyday situations - dancing with friends, sipping bubbly, talking on their mobiles - but always with a sense of self-awareness and vulnerability.

"They're multi-faceted. They're confident yet insecure, they want to flirt but don't want to be seduced," says Gory. "They're extremely complex, but very real."

I Miss You Most of All is the fourth McCulloch exhibition to be hosted by the gallery. "Last year I played up the whole sex-pot thing... The girls were a bit sexier. These women are more subtle and nostalgic," says McCulloch.

"With I Miss You Most of All, the caricatures have a sense of something missing or some sort of incompleteness. They might be missing someone or missing something of themselves - like lacking self-confidence," she adds.

McCulloch, who worked in a kitchenware shop before taking up painting full-time in 2000, plans to stick to sketching women.

"I'm not going to stop and start painting trains. There's a minefield of social and psychological ammunition out there - it's endless," she says. "If I could succinctly capture everything I see every type of woman doing, then I'll expand my subject matter. But until then I'm kept challenged by these creatures of duality and extremes." (This is an article by Rachel Wells for The Age)

See her works here and here