A Studio Visit with Miranda Skoczek: Painting Gardens on Pearls
Ahead of the opening of Tidal Wave, our latest exhibition, we spent a morning in the Melbourne studio of contemporary Australian painter, Miranda Skoczek.
Surrounded by works in progress, jars of mixed colour, and the layered surfaces her practice is known for, Miranda talked us through the symbolism she keeps returning to, the way she builds and sands back her paintings, and how she arrived at the two small worlds she painted for this exhibition.
Miranda Skoczek in her Melbourne studio
PO8: Where did you begin with the pearls?
MS: I really wanted the two pearls to be in conversation with one another. I was aware of the symbolism I've always returned to: the evil eye, and vessels - so many vessels, the most used form from antiquity. And the moon, from cosmology.
I kept circling India. In India, pearls are seen as moon droplets, which I loved, because I'm always using moon symbolism anyway. My dad was born there, so I have a very deep connection to India and to the Mughals, and I keep coming back to it.
PO8: And you've landed on flowers.
MS: I'm really exploring gardens at the moment, so it felt right to bring that language onto the pearls. They're painted in green, and painted front and back — I'd already thought of doing both sides. That way there's no single correct view; you walk around them and the composition keeps changing.
PO8: You've had to work at a very different scale here to your paint canvases.
MS: It required the finest brush, and a lot of precision. But the thinking is the same. I've always worked washy to begin with — that's how I build up my layers — though I'm using less and less medium now, almost just squeezing the paint straight out.
And I've always sanded back my surfaces, because there comes a point where you've added so much oil that if you keep going you risk it cracking. So I sand it back, and then I start adding paint on top again. I've always loved the metallics and interference colours too.
PO8: Tell us about the paint you've been collecting.
MS: My studio partner Lewis Miller works in an entirely different manner to me. He keeps all his colours around the edge of his palette, and each day he adds a little more to the pile, so they build up into these lumps. One day I came in and he'd sliced them all off into a box by the bin. I said, "Lewis, can I have your lumps?" So now I scrape and sand my surfaces back, and then fix his paint onto them. It's a yearly thing.
PO8: Pink has come into your Tidal Wave earrings as well. How did this come about?
MS: Pink is very, very me, and it's very synonymous with India. Quinacridone pink is my favourite, and I'm also loving purples and violets at the moment.
That's where you've come in. Because the painted colour on the pearls themselves is green, I wanted one small point of something bright and precious. The Pieces of Eight workshop made me a yellow gold setting with a pink sapphire, fixed into the face of one of the pearls — set flush rather than dangling, so it reads as part of the surface, not an addition to it. Pink sapphire is also my birthstone, which felt like the right note to end on: my own favourite colour, held in gold.
Exhibition image by Michael Pham
PO8: And tell us about the display you've created?
MS: I've made something for the earrings to sit within, so they can be seen in the round. I found a classical bust on Facebook Marketplace — light as anything, to my great disappointment — and I've always wanted to work into something like that with papier-mâché and paint. So the pearls have a world to belong to.
Gallery Director Melanie Katsalidis with Miranda Skoczek in her studio
Tidal Wave is on display at Pieces of Eight Gallery, 28 Russell Place Melbourne, from 13 - 29 August 2026. Keep an eye on our Instagram for more insights from the artists' studios.
