Sally McKinnon

Sally McKinnon is a trauma-informed artist based in Adelaide / Tarntanya, South Australia. Her practice moves through abstract expressionism, guided by curiosity, lived experience, and a sustained fascination with the human condition.Her work is rooted in emotion as both material and method. Rather than depicting narrative, she explores the felt experience of being alive; awe, fragility, intensity, stillness, rupture, and repair. At the centre of her practice is a simple but persistent idea: that existence itself is astonishing, and that meaning is often found in the act of paying attention.Sally’s approach is shaped by a trauma-informed lens and a background spanning mental health nursing, visual art, performance, music, curation, and community-based creative projects. This intersection informs a practice that is sensitive to emotional states, embodied experience, and the ways memory and feeling surface through gesture, colour, and material and where that all sits in the vastness of the universe.Her work reflects a belief that time is both fleeting and restorative. As her grandfather once said, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.” In response, her paintings often hold tension alongside softness containing moments of intensity balanced with a certain calm, inviting viewers to gain insight into their own internal universes.Sally’s work is held in private collections internationally.