Miriam Innes (b.1979) is an Irish visual artist who resides in Queensland, Australia. She is best known for her charcoal drawings and her large scale charcoal installations of hyper-realistic sprawling streetscapes. Even though preoccupied by the metropolis, her choice of natural materials reflects upon her childhood spent in Ireland’s boglands. Oscillating between two worlds - the natural and built environment - she likens the organic qualities of her medium, charcoal, to the 'bog oak' found close to her home. Its simplicity, Innes asserts, creates understatement, a notion echoed in her choice of mono-tone palette, yet her cityscapes loom large and are rich in their complexity.
Working in grayscale tones, the artist takes out the noise and visual assaults of the city, focusing instead on meditative linear details - the crisp lines of the pavement, the geometry of windows in sequence and of fire escape ladders zig-zagging across a façade.
Leaving the familiarity of the rural environment, the artist moved between cities in Asia, America, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia and was impacted upon by her travels and the eclectic environments that she immersed herself in.
The inspiration and awe experienced when surround by the vast cityscape resulted in a corresponding increase in the scale of her work. Her artistic progression seeks to faithfully capture the status of the city while offering a sense of intimacy and individual expression beyond the traditional bounds of hyperrealism.
Looking to New York City as her next destination, the monumental New York Rambling (2019), is a vast a 27-metre drawing and installation, produced in exquisite accuracy, that took over two years to complete.
Innes insists that the viewer is implicated in her output. She intends them to ‘experience’ her work rather than passively observing. The artist’s choice to work in large-scale places the viewer firmly inside the built environment, offering those who haven’t had the chance to visit such a large metropolis such as New York City, a taste of its vastness.
Innes has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, including the United States, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and Republic of Korea. Her work is represented in a number of private collections in the United States, United Arab Emirates, Ireland, Australia.
She was winner of the Bendigo Bank local Artist Award at the Du Rietz Art Award with her work 'Where were you when...' in 2020. Innes was also award the Lyn McCrea Memorial Drawing Award, people's choice at Noosa Art Gallery for her large scale, internationally acclaimed New York Rambling in 2020. She was invited to participate as a judge in the International Boynes Emerging Artist award in 2021 and frequently conducts workshops and give talks on her creative process.
