Romy Durrant is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist. Romy’s practice draws from her background in creative writing, alongside autoethnographic approaches to meaning-making. Romy is interested in the world-making qualities of abstract painting, and how the artist’s relationships with colour, gesture, space and materials can accommodate and excite neurodivergent perspectives to shape and redefine environments of care, identity and belonging.
Romy applies oils intuitively and iteratively to stretched linen and paper. A painting’s final ‘resting place’ is teased out after repeated building up, stripping back and reworking of early layers. The paintings arrive at themes the process itself grapples with — erasure, concealment, departure — tentatively holding the viewer inside a novel space of teeming and surfaced energies beyond the boundaries of societal expectation.
EDUCATION & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
2024 — Bisque Studios: Handbuilding with Kate Butler; Next Steps on the Wheel with Cassie Lynch; Beginner Wheel with Mason Reed
2021 — RMIT University — Casework, Counselling and Advocacy; Ethical, Organisational and Legal Contexts of Social Work Practice
2017 — Research Strategies - Design/Creative Arts; Media Communication Futures; Research Laboratory One; Research Practice One
2016 — Global Mobility Program: Creative Writing, The University of Westminster, London
2016 — RMIT University — Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing)
2012 — Chisholm Institute — Certificate IV in Professional Writing and Editing
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024 — Sentient Worlds, Incinerator Gallery: Offsite Exhibition at Niddrie Library
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023 — Small Works, Unassigned Gallery, Melbourne/Naarm
2023 — A Disability Lens on Climate Emergency, CLIMARTE, Melbourne/Naarm
2023 — Fifty Squared Art Prize, Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne/Naarm
2023 — WIP, The Dax Centre, Melbourne/Naarm
2020 — From Heart + Mind, The Dax Centre, Melbourne/Naarm
RESIDENCIES & ACHIEVEMENTS
2025 — Magnify: Artist in Residence, Kingston Arts
2022-2023 — Studio Artist, Studio Dax, The Dax Centre, Melbourne/Naarm
2019-2020 — Artist-in-residence, The Dax Centre, Melbourne/Naarm
2019 — Panelist, Masterclass: Emerging Editors, The Emerging Writers’ Festival, Melbourne/Naarm
2019 — Artist, The Emerging Writers’ Festival, Melbourne/Naarm
2018 — Artist-in-residence, Malthouse Theatre for The Other Film Festival, Melbourne/Naarm
2018 — Nexus Program Artist, Arts Access Victoria
AWARDS & GRANTS
2021 — Accelerate: Nurture Funding for Deaf and Disabled Artists, Arts Access Victoria
2018 — RMIT Creative Grant for Lor Journal
2017 — Matched Funding Boost by the Australian Cultural Fund for Lor Journal
2017 — RMIT Arts Link Creative Funding for Lor Journal
2016 — RMIT Equity Travel Grant