Mary Stephens is an artist and designer whose work is shaped by a lifelong fascination with colour, form and the natural world. Raised in the small Tasmanian township of Ouse, her earliest memories of hawthorn hedges, wildflowers, summer fruit and changing seasons continue to influence her creative practice.
A graduate of the Swinburne School of Design with an Honours degree, Mary has spent more than 25 years working across branding, marketing, design and communications in the fashion, retail, hospitality and lifestyle sectors. She currently works in brand and marketing for Else Bathhouse in Melbourne.
Alongside her commercial career, painting has remained a constant. Working from her home studio, Mary creates expressive mixed-media works that blur the boundaries between fine art and design. In 2019, she held her first solo exhibition, NativeGray, featuring contemporary botanical still lifes. Created using acrylic, charcoal and soft pastel on dressmaker’s card, the works combine layered colour, raw textures and instinctive mark-making to create bold, graphic compositions that are discovered through the process of painting rather than predetermined.
Inspired by nature, textiles, architecture and contemporary design, Mary‘s work balances refinement with spontaneity. Soft neutrals and metallics sit alongside bold charcoal and vibrant colour, while expressive linework shifts between delicate and expressive. While her early practice centred on modern botanical still lifes, her more recent paintings have become increasingly abstract, drawing inspiration from memories of European travel, architecture, and the changing qualities of light, colour and place.
Her paintings invite viewers to slow down and engage with colour, texture and memory, creating a quiet dialogue between observation, emotion and place.