Shirley Ploog is a visual artist based in Barwon Heads, Victoria, whose practice is grounded in an intimate connection with the natural world. Her work explores the quiet beauty and fragility of the environments she immerses herself in—particularly her home in a small coastal town and the salt lakes of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, where she continues an ongoing dialogue with place through observation, material experimentation, and collaboration with nature.
Working across painting and lumen printing, Shirley’s practice weaves together the tactile and the ephemeral. Her process embraces chance and control, fragility and resilience, presence and absence—dualities that mirror the shifting rhythms of the landscape itself. Through delicate mark making, subtle shifts in tone, and a sensitivity to light and form, she captures not only the appearance of the natural world, but its underlying stillness and wonder.
Her work invites contemplation, offering space for memory, emotion, and environment to converge. Walking, observing, and responding are central to her process, each gesture informed by a deep attentiveness to time and transformation.
Shirley has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions across Australia. In 2025, she was a finalist in numerous prizes, most recently in the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award, the Northern Beaches Environmental Art and Design Award, Omnia Art Prize and the Stanthorpe Art Prize and completed an Artist in Residence program at Ballara Art Retreat, where she developed new work from her salt lake explorations.
Ploog continues to explore the dualities of absence and presence, permanence and erosion within the Australian landscape with ongoing research in the salt lakes of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula where her work offers a quiet space for reflection—an invitation to pause, notice, and feel the subtle language of nature.