Artist Profile — Diana Miller
Diana Miller is an abstract painter and assemblage artist based in Byron Bay. Born and raised in Cape Town, her practice is grounded in shape-making and the expressive power of colour. Her paintings unfold through a playful negotiation between intuition and control, where raw, instinctive gestures meet a deliberate urge to edit, disrupt, deconstruct and begin again.
New beginnings have become a way of life for Miller, who has navigated thirty house moves since immigrating to Australia. This continual cycle of upheaval and reassembly is mirrored in her work — paintings that pulse with the energy of disruption and the quiet discipline of restoration.
With a sensibility shaped through her background in graphic design, Miller rejects figurative representation in favour of open, emotional inquiry, revelling in happy accidents. Her paintings express a compulsion to move; to respond to the insistent pleasures of colour, texture, shape, and material. She builds layered compositions from elements she has cut, coloured, shaped, and imagined — an evolving visual lexicon in which past and present remain in dialogue. Her work is a vivid celebration of art’s capacity to defy logic; to optimistically leap into the unknown and somehow stick the landing, finding beauty in what emerges.
Miller completed her contemporary art studies at The Byron School or Art where she received the Graduate Award in 2018. She has held multiple solo exhibitions across Australia, has been awarded prizes in various national art prizes and has been a finalist in the Clayton Utz, Omnia and BAM Art Prizes. Miller has completed commissions for clients in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Japan and across Australia. Over the past decade, her paintings have been featured in several notable Australian magazines.
