A Huon Valley artist working under the name Leaking Grey, Renae Grundy creates drawings and paintings that explore mortality, memory, symbolism and the quiet dignity of things that do not last.

Renae’s work moves between detailed pen and ink, acrylic painting and an evolving combination of the two. Birds, bones, animals, female figures and ordinary objects recur throughout her work. She is interested in the way familiar things can carry meaning beyond themselves, becoming relics, symbols or small containers for memory.

There is often darkness to her work, but she prefers not to think of it as bleak. Renae is drawn to the beauty and strangeness that exist alongside grief, ageing, change and impermanence. A dead flower, a weathered bone or a bird can be both entirely ordinary and something more.

Her recent body of work has become looser and more painterly, bringing the precision of ink into conversation with the unpredictability and texture of paint.Renae is interested in allowing those different ways of working to interrupt each other rather than resolving everything neatly.

Leaking Grey began as a place for her drawings to exist outside her everyday life and has gradually developed into a broader art practice. Renae makes original works as well as archival fine-art prints, and is increasingly interested in creating work that occupies the territory between the beautiful and the unsettling.