Lara Bardsley is an award winning Australian artist who has been successfully creating and exhibiting her work for 15 years. Lara spent the first 20 years of her career as a psychologist working creatively with people to explore the depths of the human experience. Since she was a child, Lara has made art and after a health crisis that left her bed-ridden for a year and permanently changed the pace and flow of her life, she became committed to following her bliss, and to make art as a career. Lara trained at the prestigious Victoria College of the Arts and then pursued a PhD that used fine art to give language to her most deeply held stories, the narratives of her heart and soul. Lara was awarded the Nancy Millis medal of excellence for women’s outstanding contribution to research, for her unique art-based PhD investigation into the nature of Self.
Using photography, figurative and abstract fine art practices, Lara’s art explores the wisdom and capacity each of us has for wholeness, insight and compassion. Her work follows a felt experience of union with all life and landscape. Lara’s artworks, whether beguiling beautiful figures alluding to mythic narratives, colourful abstracts or evocative mark-making, are guided by her intuitive and felt experience. The finished works have the capacity to touch the viewer, inviting them to a sense of presence and peace. Lara draws on her 23 years as a depth psychologist and 30 years as a meditation and Buddhist practitioner to translate a deeply felt sense of compassion and wonder into her artworks. She frequently uses gold to allude to her sense of a unified presence of wonder and grace. Lara's artworks are comprised of many layers, just as each human being holds many stories within them. Lara has been invited to exhibit widely over the past 15 years in solo and group shows, and her work is collected nationally and internationally. She divides her time between Melbourne and the lush coastal rainforest of Lorne, Victoria.