Pauline, The Lost Ones {Ballarat Hidden Lanes Self Guided Tour}

So my name is Paulina Shanesey-Dowling and I'm a visual artist from Ballarat. I mean I feel like my work always comes back to, there's a real joyful element to it. You know the world can be a very serious place and you know there's a lot of sadness and a lot of difficult stuff that people are dealing with every day and I feel like partly it's my job to I suppose show another part of the world that maybe it might have a little window into just pure enjoyment. So if I'm sort of drawing you know funny little trees with bits popping out and colour and joyful baubles and hills that are you know like rainbow hills and things like that and all of these beautiful little whimsical elements that I draw in, I just sort of feel like it gives people a bit of a rest from all the serious stuff. Whenever I think about my drawing now it always takes me straight back to when I was a child growing up on the farm in the Wimmera in a small hamlet I suppose by the name of Banyina and I always think about the time spent there as a young person and living on this you know large farm and exploring paddocks and our family lived on the river, the Richardson River and it was a very beautiful place and there was a lot of time to explore and look around the countryside and fall in love with trees and nature and you know get out and just enjoy the beauty of the local environment and whenever I'm drawing I think about those days and the love that I had and still have for that part of my life. I've always been very interested in mark making and I suppose as a young person growing up on the farm we were always encouraged to have interests and to apply ourselves to interests and to I suppose in a sense not be getting under our parents feet and sort of be pursuing things that we, well I suppose that were meaningful and that we enjoyed and that could keep us occupied in a sense so there was always that sort of underpinning and the other thing that was I think very important in my I suppose my visual world was the house that we grew up in had the old pressed tin walls and ceilings and they were very decorative and as children we were just fascinated by this old house and all the beautiful decorative walls and you know often in summer you know we'd be lying on the floor trying to cool out as kids all in a row and we'd be looking up at the ceilings in the house and sort of looking for irregularities in the patterns and talking about the patterns and being quite fascinated with this kind of I suppose decorative sort of house in the middle of this quite sort of bleak kind of country landscape I suppose quite a creative childhood really and sort of encouraged to be you know creative within yourself but then I did go on to nursing I followed a nursing career very practical and I always appreciated I loved being a nurse and I loved all of my patients and my colleagues and I always it was really important to me because it set me up as an independent person and got me working and got me out there but I always had a dream that I would move into the creative arts somewhere whether it might be writing because I always loved pen and pencil on paper always loved that idea even just thinking about it I loved so that was always sort of a long-term dream so it sort of became a reality when my husband and I moved here to Ballarat I'd done 20 years of nursing and we would you know got ourselves kind of in a fairly comfortable position and I was looking we'd moved to Ballarat I was looking through the newspaper one day the Courier and I saw an advertisement for a Diploma of Arts here at Ballarat University I think it was called at that time and I thought ah that's for me I'm going to do that so I enrolled in the Diploma of Visual Arts it was called did that for two years full-time here I am today so the wonderful thing about the Diploma it was actually a TAFE course it's it was very focused on the vocation of art and applying like setting yourself up in a studio and not just pursuing your love of art but being able to at least think about setting it up so that you had maybe a small business or that you could pursue it into the future so that's what I did I did sort of have a bit of a dabble with tertiary study at one point the Bachelor of Fine Arts but I didn't pursue that because it was getting in the way of my drawing and my art I suppose so I just continued on with my this love that I developed of making marks on paper and drawing and I felt very I've always felt very strongly that was really important to me and something that I should pursue and and that I could pursue so here I am still pursuing my drawing and having some really nice little wins and you know sort of making a bit of a name for myself with my drawing and yeah really loving it when I'm exploring my new my drawings it's it is a real exploration of the fine liner on paper and this kind of it's kind of got a lyrical kind of a sense to it the the line sort of flows in almost like almost like a narrative really it's almost like a story across the page I do a lot of I love playing around with with trees and strange and unusual architecture that I sort of some of the ideas I take from real life some of it I make up and so I create these landscapes they might be it might be an urban landscape or partially I might draw in parts of the natural environment into the net into the urban landscape and create these yeah kind of like lyrical kind of drawings I suppose some people might describe them as whimsical and then I fill it all in with color like I just punch it all in with color pattern I love I love using a pattern a lot of lines and I suppose polka dots I'll call them and spirals and I have a lot of motifs that I love to use repetitively but it's that packing in of color that I suppose really defines my work yeah so very very colorful and whimsical and lyrical I think and quite joyful there's a real joyful element to my artwork sometimes when you're describing to people that you're an artist and it can be can be difficult for people to understand that that's what you're kind of building your career and a lot of your life around there's a there's a sometimes not a lot of understanding about what that actually means or how important it can be because my I feel like my drawing if I'm away if I get away from my drawing for a period of time I've really feel it but being able to come back to the studio and recommence a drawing is is sort of like my sole signature or something I don't really know how to describe that but it's very much you know that making your own mark like that at your own sort of creative part of the world is very important to me I think it's important to everyone actually to have that kind of creative voice that really defines you as an individual so I feel like I'm you know my drawing is you know sometimes you might be explaining to somebody that you have an art practice and it's almost like oh yes well it's a hobby or you know it's somehow just isn't a real there isn't a real thing or it isn't a real job but sometimes I feel very disappointed when you get when I get that maybe that kind of a reaction because it's very real to me and it's very important and it's and it's really you know it's it's a very important part of my life but also you can bring other people into it like I have students that I work with and drawings that I create for other organizations that are important and yeah so it's very much a very solid part of my life oh look I really feel that I feel like I've been very lucky because when I arrived in Ballarat that's when I started my creative career and I sort of feel like that's something Ballarat's given me like because the whole time I've been here I've been pursuing this dream of mine and I always associate that with coming to Ballarat like that's where I did my sort of more formal study and I've kind of built up a really nice practice I'm really happy and you know there's been a lot of support over the years from lots of different organizations and individuals and you know just think generally the community at large so for me it's a very happy what's the word relationship that's what I'm trying to think of a very happy relationship for me yeah