Artist Profile CV

Michelle Saleeba is an artist and psychologist based in Perth, Western Australia.
Her creative work explores the relationship between landscape, memory, and emotion. Through drawing and painting, Michelle investigates how internal states are shaped by – and mirrored in – our experience of the natural world. She is drawn to places that hold personal and emotional resonance, often returning to familiar terrain as a way of mapping both the external and the internal.

Much of her work responds to the Australian landscape and coastline, vast spaces where light, movement, and elemental forces echo the emotional undercurrents of human experience. The ocean, in particular, recurs as a motif: a space of immersion, change, and reflection. Her seascapes sit alongside her landscapes, offering a shifting horizon where memory and mood intermingle.

Working primarily with acrylic, ink, and pastel, her process is slow and layered, allowing images to surface gradually through mark-making, erasure, and repetition. Her compositions often sit on the edge of abstraction, where horizon lines blur and the boundary between place and feeling becomes porous.

Michelle’s practice is informed by walking, noticing and returning, using movement through landscape as a way to access what sits just beyond conscious awareness. While her works begin with sensory impressions and lived experience, they often touch on broader, universal themes: impermanence, belonging and our need for connection with the natural world.

As a psychologist, Michelle also recognises the power of creative process to hold complexity and generate insight, though her art is not didactic or therapeutic in intent. It offers instead a space for reflection and connection, inviting the viewer to bring their own associations and emotions to the work.

She also uses art in her psychology and community engagement work, and works from the belief that art and creative expression are fundamentally good for us, creating space for reflection, connection, and emotional clarity.