Melbourne-based Anna Finlayson is best known for her spatially engaged installations and floor-based sculptural assemblages, often using everyday objects—plastic balls, electrical cables, pre-fabricated matter—transformed through obsessive order and visual logic.

Beneath this materiality lies a decades-long investigation into the grid as both visual system and site of subjectivity. Her ongoing spectrum drawings—painstakingly constructed grids of gouache daubs—double as data sets and diaristic meditations. Time, gesture, colour and numerical calculation converge into a singular process that is equal parts ritual, record, and visual rhythm.

Anna’s work has been exhibited widely, with solo shows at The Substation, Sarah Scout Presents, and Linden New Art, and group shows at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Conical, and Block Projects. She holds a PhD in Fine Art and her works are held in major collections including Artbank and the NGV.

“Finlayson's colour choices and gestures may be pretty and palatable, but the sustained rigour of her process and logic puts these works in another realm entirely.”
— Dan Rule, The Age

Anna has presented solo exhibitions at The Substation (2013); Sarah Scout Presents (2019, 2015, 2013 and 2009); Linden Centre for Contemporary Art (2007); Mir 11 (2004); Gertrude Contemporary (2004); Canberra Contemporary Art Space (2003); Conical (2002); 1st Floor Artists and Writers Space (2001) among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including: Drawing Folio 3, Block Projects, Melbourne (2019); Drawing Folio 2, Block Projects, Melbourne (2012); Composition, Conical, Melbourne (2010); Plastic Theory, Peleton Gallery, Sydney (2008) and I heard it through the grapevine, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2003). 

Anna was a Gertrude Contemporary studio artist from 2003–04 and undertook an extended residency at the CAMAC Art Centre in France between 2007 and 2009. She has completed degrees in Painting (Victorian College of the Arts) and Textile Design (RMIT University) as well as a Masters of Fine Art in 2001 and a PhD in 2022, both at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including Artbank and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Book Anna Finlayson for:

• Mentorships, talks, or workshops on systems-based visual logic, and process-driven practice

• Insightful discussions on how structure and subjectivity co-exist in contemporary art

• Explorations of material thinking, repetition, and the grid as a site of personal and visual inquiry

• Support for artists and institutions seeking depth in method, process, and practice-led research