The Best Female Australian Artists We’re Loving Right Now

If you’re searching for standout Australian art to bring depth and character to your home, female Australian artists offer some of the most compelling work in the country. Their practices span contemporary painting, photography, fibre art and ceramics, making it easier to find a piece that aligns with your interior style and budget.

In this guide, we’ve curated leading female artists from across Australia to help you discover work that feels meaningful, expressive and truly suited to your space.

Del Kathryn Barton

Known for her vivid, intricately detailed visual worlds, Del Kathryn Barton has shaped one of Australia’s most recognisable contemporary styles. Her figures and botanicals move through dense pattern and colour, exploring imagination, femininity and emotional interiority with unmistakable clarity. A two-time Archibald Prize winner, she works across painting, drawing, sculpture and film, creating pieces that push into bold, dreamlike territory while retaining a strong sense of technical precision.

Sophie Corks

Sophie Corks paints with a lively, modern approach to rural Australia, capturing the character of regional communities and open landscapes through bold colour and energetic form. Her work leans into emotion and atmosphere, drawing from lived experience in country settings rather than urban environments. Each piece offers a fresh, expressive view of life outside the city.

Fran Max 

Fran Max, a contemporary artist hailing from Melbourne, Australia, offers a unique lens into life’s everyday moments, often with a touch of humour. Her art is a reflection of her personal experiences, and as it evolves on the canvas, she hopes to evoke an uplifting feeling in her patrons. She’s best known for her Mediterranean-inspired seafood paintings, which are reminiscent of her grandfather Ernie Carroll’s creative legacy. Both Fran and Ernie express art through life’s hilarity.

For Fran, however, the joy of creating art extends beyond the canvas. She finds fulfilment in seeing her work grace the walls of art enthusiasts.

Freestone Art 

Working on Awabakal Country, Lauren Freestone draws from her Wiradjuri heritage and early years on Gumbaynggirr Country to create works shaped by memory, landscape and family history. Guided by the artistic legacy of her father, Lee Freestone, she builds compositions through layered mediums and an earthy palette that mirrors the textures of Country. Her paintings bridge cultural lineage and contemporary expression with clarity and depth.

Bonnie Gray

Based on the Central Coast, Bonnie Gray works with saturated colour and abstract form in ways that feel instantly recognisable. Her palette draws on ‘90s tropical tones, paired with shapes and markings that hint at personal stories beneath the surface. Influences from the south of France and Paris ripple through her compositions, giving each piece a light, playful energy. The result is art that lifts a room with confident colour and expressive ease.

Tegan Franks 

From Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Tegan Franks paints with a clarity shaped by her coastal surroundings. Her pared-back compositions hold the ease of long summer days, using soft tones and open space to create a sense of calm. By removing unnecessary detail, she lets light, colour and form carry the mood, producing work that resonates with anyone drawn to Australia’s shoreline beauty.

Madeline Jovicic

Madeline Jovicic, a Newcastle-based multidisciplinary artist, brings a touch of summer nostalgia to her creations. With a palette boasting pinks, blues, yellows, and burnt sienna, she weaves scenes that transport you to sunny shores and seaside towns. Her art is a vivid tapestry of past summers, holidays, and vibrant colours. It’s like a visual yearning for those warm days, a reminder of “places you’d rather be,” as she’d put it.

Atong Atem

Born in Ethiopia and raised in Australia, Atong Atem works with photography to examine identity, diaspora and representation through a vivid, stylised lens. Her portraits — often of herself or friends — fold colour, pattern and gesture into layered narratives shaped by postcolonial thought. Installation and video deepen this exploration, creating work with unmistakable presence and a compelling sense of cultural and personal resonance.

Elizabeth Barnett

A Victorian-based artist whose creative practice encompasses painting, printmaking and illustration, Elizabeth Barnett’s work is a cheery and beautiful documentation of her surroundings. Her paintings often depict intimate domestic spaces filled with exotic and interesting plants, colour, treasured objects and furniture, seasonal still-life compositions and landscapes, and will bring vibrancy to any room in your home. 

Thea Anamara Perkins

Sydney-based Thea Anamara Perkins is an Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist, practising portraiture and landscape to question representations of First Nations peoples and Country. Her pieces are done with a delicate hand but often answer heavier questions about what it means to be indigenous in contemporary Australia.

Perkins often delves into her family’s photographic archive for source material, attracted to ‘the glimmer’ of the hyper-saturated, almost cinematic expression of old photos, and the melancholia that comes with seeing a moment in time you can no longer access. Her works are therefore oft-evocative snapshots of comfort and certainty — smiling faces and happy memories. 

Eliza Gosse 

Eliza Gosse explores life through the lens of architecture — specifically the clean, simple lines of post-war and mid-century design. Her paired back images are more in line with an evocation of an era or place, and the people who may once have lived there. Sleek, stylised, and with quirky, pop-culture-referenced titles, each piece is enhanced by a muted colour palette that bathes each scene in nostalgia. They’re the perfect statement for any home. 

Libby Haines 

Known for sell-out drops and a devoted online following, Libby Haines paints domestic life with vivid colour and an instinctive sense of composition. Her still-life scenes often reflect the rhythm of home — shared meals, small rituals, moments of ease — shaped by her experience as both mother and artist. Saturated tones give each work a slightly surreal edge, bringing warmth and nostalgia to spaces in a fresh, contemporary way.

Lisa Nooin

Inspired by fashion, flowers, interiors and the women around her, Lisa Nooin brings bold colour and considered form to her work. Raised in South-West Sydney by Vietnamese parents, she draws on her graphic design background to shape compositions with clean structure and strong visual rhythm. Her illustrations balance pattern, tone and line with ease, creating pieces that stand out effortlessly in contemporary homes.

Whitney Spicer 

Drawing from her love of interiors and design, Whitney Spicer paints still-life and leisure scenes shaped by calm, domestic rhythm. Recent works widen that view, shifting toward cowboys, horses and sunlit tennis courts, all expressed through her signature, pared-back warmth. By lifting familiar motifs into soft, expressive compositions, she gives everyday moments and nostalgic pastimes the same considered attention, creating art that settles easily into contemporary homes with gentle charm.

Lucy Roleff 

Based in Melbourne, Lucy Roleff creates still-life paintings marked by precision and quiet intensity. Her compositions draw from historic approaches to the genre, yet feel distinctly modern in their restraint and attention to detail. Everyday objects become focal points, rendered with a level of clarity that invites close looking. Her work appears in private collections across Australia and abroad, valued for its depth, atmosphere and refined sense of mood.

By Narjia Brownlie

By Narjia Brownlie paints the bonds between women with a softened, expressive touch. Her figures, often abstracted and intertwined, speak to connection, support and the shifting emotional states that shape relationships. Movement flows through each composition, capturing shared moments with an ease that feels instinctive rather than staged. The result is work that reflects the strength and tenderness found in sisterhood, rendered through a warm, fluid visual language.

Stacey Rees 

Based in Gariwerd, Stacey Rees works with portraiture to explore presence and perception. Her paintings sit between abstraction and likeness, focusing on mood, gesture and the subtleties that shape how we read a face. With exhibitions dating back to 2002 and recognition in prizes including the Percival and the Lester, her practice shows a steady, thoughtful evolution grounded in close observation and a strong visual instinct.

Wendy Hubert

The Australian landscape has never looked more luminous under this exceptional Australian artist’s steady painting hand. A Yindjibarndi Elder, linguist and Cultural Custodian, Wendy Hubert paints with a depth shaped by Country and story. Her works draw from the West Pilbara tablelands, honouring ancestral knowledge, community histories and the ongoing strength of Yindjibarndi culture. Colour, line and movement carry lived memory, creating paintings that speak to place with clarity and conviction.

Her practice is both artistic and cultural, reflecting a lifelong commitment to care for Country and language.

Maryanne Moodie

Working between Melbourne and Brooklyn, Maryanne Moodie brings depth and colour to fibre art through richly textured weavings. Her wall hangings play with tone and form in ways that feel both nostalgic and contemporary, drawing on vintage palettes and hand-crafted detail. Beyond her own pieces, she teaches weaving through workshops and online courses, extending her influence across the fibre community. Her work can be found at Fenton & Fenton.

Emma Gale

Emma Gale’s connection with Africa shapes much of her vivid, layered work. Time spent in Egypt and Ethiopia, supporting an NGO, informs the colour, rhythm and depth that define her practice. Based in Northern NSW, she moves confidently between painting and clay, creating pieces marked by bold forms and instinctive use of tone. Her vessels and artworks add a refreshing, globally attuned perspective to the Australian art landscape.

Kara Rosenlund

Based in Queensland, Kara Rosenlund has defined a distinctive place in Australia’s photographic landscape. Her lens moves between coastlines, open plains and the shifting tone of natural light, creating images with measured clarity and warmth. Portraits, still-life studies and landscapes sit alongside each other with natural ease, each piece shaped by her instinct for composition. Her work settles seamlessly into interiors across the country in a way that feels timeless.

Kirsten Perry

From her Preston studio, Kirsten Perry creates vessels and sculptural forms shaped by her interest in imperfection. Each piece carries soft irregularities, subtle shifts in contour and a sense of gentle honesty drawn from wabi-sabi principles. Her approach feels grounded and tactile, with muted surfaces that hold character. You’ll find her work at Brunswick’s Mr Kitly, where its thoughtful restraint sits naturally among considered design.

Odette Ireland

From her Sydney studio, Odette Ireland shapes clay into forms that feel weightless, almost airborne. Working with raku, stoneware and porcelain, she builds each piece through slip-casting, press moulding and hand-cut slabs, creating sculptures that tilt toward Calder’s poetic balance. Her work moves between shadow and light with quiet tension, turning familiar materials into something far more enigmatic — sculptural moments that feel caught mid-flight.

Kimmy Hogan

Digital art rarely feels this tactile. Working from her Geelong studio, Kimmy Hogan builds each composition by hand on a mouse, layering petals, stems and soft architectural curves with the patience of a painter. Her botanicals pulse with earthy colour and quiet depth, balancing lush tones against pared-back pastels. The result is art that slots into a room with instant presence.

From paintings to sculptures, illustrations to digital art, this exhibition of female Australian artists is sure to inspire your next decorating masterstroke. If you’re looking for more ceramic pieces to lend your home an artful touch, look to our pick of the best Australian ceramic brands, or if you’re looking to learn how to harness colour psychology, head on over here.