Leigh Woodburgess, from Djilang/Geelong, is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist whose practice moves between myth and modernity, exploring how images carry, lose and regenerate symbolic meaning through transformation. Working primarily in large-scale, collage-informed drawing and painting, alongside photography and print, he brings fragments of art history, comparative world mythologies, mass media and his own photographic archive into shifting material relationships.
Through fragmentation, layering, reproduction and intuitive mark-making, Woodburgess retains fragments of figure and symbol as points of recognition within increasingly unstable imagery. Figuration drifts toward abstraction and back again; familiar forms are cut, displaced and reassembled, allowing inherited associations to persist without fixing the image to its original meaning. The whole image need not survive for something potent to remain.
Underlying the practice is a longstanding fascination with archetype, dream and the liminal, and with the ways symbolic forms migrate across cultures, histories and contemporary image culture. Rather than illustrating established mythologies, Woodburgess draws upon their visual residues as material for transformation, allowing ancient and contemporary imagery to collide within new configurations. His works occupy a threshold between recognition and instability, asking what an image can continue to transmit as its source, context and visual syntax are progressively disrupted. With a background in design and expanded painting, his practice spans digital and analogue methods. He continues to develop projects that explore the unseen architectures of consciousness.
He acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land where he lives and works (Victoria, Australia)— the Wurundjeri and Wadawurrung of the Kulin Nations — and recognises that sovereignty was never ceded.
Personal Details:
Leigh Woodburgess (He/Him)
Education:
RMIT Melbourne, Master of Fine Art – Coursework, 2025
Melbourne Polytechnic, Bachelor of Illustration (1st year), 2023
Monash University, Bachelor of Graphic Design, 1999
Gordon Institute-Geelong, Diploma of Design, 1996
Relevant Experience:
Professional Artist, 2007- current
Art Therapy & Life Drawing tutor/teacher, 2010-current
Gallery Manager, Melbourne, 2012-15
Art Director, Art & Design studio, Melbourne, 2000-2004
Selected Exhibitions:
Solo/
‘E&M’, Synergy Gallery, Melbourne 2010
‘Recent works’, Kent St, Melbourne 2007
‘4sail, sold’, Red Gallery, Melbourne 2006
Group/
'MFA Graduation Exhibition‘, RMIT Melbourne December 2025
'Convergence’, Blindside Gallery Melbourne July 2025
‘MFA Art Auction’, Gossard Gallery, Melbourne August 2024
‘Paper’, Craft Victoria, Melbourne 2004
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