Intuitive Practice
Marie-Louise Bahnson is a maker and artist whose practice centres on intuitive abstraction and material-led exploration. Working primarily through painting and textile, her work engages colour, surface, and repetition as a means of inquiry rather than resolution.
Her approach resists linear progression, favouring instead an ongoing dialogue between past and present works. Unresolved paintings, studies, and fragments are retained and revisited, forming an internal archive that continually informs new outcomes.
Bahnson’s work reflects a commitment to process, allowing time, uncertainty, and reuse to shape the evolution of the practice.
Born in Denmark and raised in Australia, Louise’s creative life has always been shaped by movement, adaptation, and making meaning across places. After arriving in Australia at a young age, she grew up living in multiple rural communities, an experience that fostered a deep sensitivity to landscape, texture, and the quiet rhythms of everyday life that continue to surface in her work.
For the past 26 years, Louise has called Tamborine Mountain home, where she lives with her husband and family. Her studio practice sits within this layered life, often blurring the boundaries between art, teaching, and storytelling.
With over 30 years as a working artist, Louise has a rich and varied creative history. She is the General Manager and co-owner of Goat Track Theatre, one of Australia’s largest youth theatre companies, and has worked extensively as a teacher, writer, director, and costume designer across countless projects. Visual art has always threaded its way through this work, appearing in sets, costumes, props, and creative processes.
In recent years, Louise has consciously allowed her visual arts practice to move to the foreground, embracing painting and textile/fibre work as her primary creative language. What might look like a “new direction” is, in fact, the quiet culmination of decades spent making, mentoring, and creating across disciplines, a return to the heart of her creative impulse.