Step Outside

Catalogue Essay by Phe Luxford, 2026
To step outside is to submit to a small, decisive reorientation. It is a bodily action, plain, almost unremarkable, yet it can undo the stubbornness of thought. For Western Australian artist Melissa Boughey, this movement is both pragmatic and philosophical: a plea to think beyond the habitual frame and an instruction to physically relocate, so that perception might be renewed. The paintings created for Step Outside are not depictions of landscape so much as the record of landscape’s capacity to reorient the self: to shift attention, recalibrate feeling, and exercise a state of alert presence.

Boughey has lived and worked on her farm in the lower regions of Western Australia for three decades. This long intimacy with place, and an awareness of its cultivated rhythms and unruly ecology, does not produce settled images. Instead, it sharpens her aptitude for changeability: observing the shifting fall of shadows cast across a gravel path and reflections within dense wetland foliage, where branches entwine and separate in a doubled, watery echo. These are not motifs to be translated literally. They are catalysts, brief optical and bodily events, that set the work in motion.

A recent studio relocation to a different section of her property has brought a new spaciousness into Boughey’s routine, offering room to move and a more immediate relationship to the wetlands beyond. Observing the landscape from her vantage point, her new studio windows serve as a threshold between inside and out, reframing what lies beyond, not as neat vignettes but rather as instructions: calling the artist to take up paper and paint and explore directly, to leave the studio and enter the world outside. In amongst the water and reeds she makes direct notes of what she observes there: light pierces, ricochets and dulls; paperbark branches emerge, sprawling from their verdant waters, throwing liquid shadows and glimmering shards that refuse to hold still. This is the exhibition’s quiet insistence: that a place is never static, and that attention, when granted fully, reveals endless revisions.

Boughey’s abstraction is built from this active looking. Like the loose plein air notations that form the early drafts of her image making, the resulting studio paintings continue this sense of ongoing adjustment, distilling a lived encounter rather than describing the literal. They translate the external sensations of the world outside into a visual language of tempo, surface, and colour. Gestural slabs and scraped passages suggest depth without reliance on perspective; forms collide, dissolve, and reassert. Transparent layers behave like memory: cumulative, permeable, allowing earlier incidents to remain visible beneath what comes later.

The viewer senses the artist’s ongoing negotiation with paint and its capacity for change, of painting as lived time, with all its revisions, hesitations, and sudden clarities. In pursuit of the essential, these artworks become a fused proposition: mind and matter, observation and feeling, enmeshed into one invigorated afterimage, gently freed from fixed thinking and opened to the possibilities found in the act of reorientation.