Renée Estée (b. 1993, Australia) links ideas and imagery of the Australian Outback, Hauntology and Orphism, Renée’s practice highlights myth-making and rituals surrounding mourning, celebration and commemoration. Operating as visual love letters and epitaphs, her paintings coalesce figuration and abstraction to conjure spaces where she can commune with the deceased and contend with future loss. Pairing stretched and un- stretched canvases together, Renée evokes circular narratives that rekindle familial histories, references to poetry and contemplations of afterlife beliefs.

Carving out spaces from thick impasto marks alongside thin washes and surface stains, apparitional figures materialize from layered, loose, gestural marks and animals wander in the peripheries, simultaneously observing departures and transformations taking place in an allegorical afterlife/underworld environment. Renée considers paintings ability to encase a memory and retell it to offer something new; how the act of storytelling through painting both warps and re-enlivens the past, whilst contending with the future and what comes after.