Biography
Sharon Quigley is an award-winning Scottish artist whose work is celebrated for its intricate beauty, sensitivity, and quietly uplifting presence. Based in Edinburgh, where she lives and works, Quigley has built a distinguished career exhibiting widely across the UK and internationally, earning recognition for both her technical accomplishment and the emotional resonance of her practice.
A graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Quigley went on to complete an MA in European Fine Art in Barcelona. Over the years, she has received numerous accolades, including the W & Jay Gordon Smith Award, the Royal Scottish Academy Latimer Award, the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts Exhibitionship Prize, the Jeffrey Orchar Award for Painting, the SSA Edinburgh Printmakers Award, and two Hope Scott Awards. Her commitment to the arts community is also reflected in her role as a Past President of the Society of Scottish Artists.
Quigley’s paintings are held in a wide range of public and private collections, including the University of Stirling Art Collection, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Mastercard, the Bank of Montreal, Baillie Gifford, Art in Health Care, and the Buccleuch Art Collection. Alongside her studio practice, she has undertaken a number of highly regarded public art commissions and research projects.
She is perhaps best known for her exploration of biological and biophilic form, an approach rooted in the human affinity for nature and the origins of pattern. Through carefully observed detail, layered colour, and richly worked surfaces, her work evokes organic structures and natural rhythms that foster a sense of calm and connection. This sensitivity has led to significant commissions within healthcare environments, where her paintings and visual interventions contribute to wellbeing and restorative spaces. Notable projects include work for the Edinburgh Haematology Department, Cancer Assessment Unit, Edinburgh Dialysis Centre, The Royal Edinburgh Hospital and the Royal Hospital for Children and young People.
Sharon Quigley balances a self-directed studio practice with collaborative, research-led projects shaped through site specific artworks in healing and healthcare environments. At the centre of her current work is a simple but persistent question: ‘We are such complex, intimate, and impressively sensitive creatures. What are we picking up, absorbing, carrying, and storing?’
Painting begins with the body; its physicality, sensitivity and relationship to the material. She creates intricate, patterned surfaces that merge anatomical, cellular, botanical and topographic systems, tracing connections between internal and external worlds. Through immersive, layered compositions, her work explores vulnerability, communication and embodied awareness.
Recent paintings unfold as imagined, dreamlike inner landscapes that invite a slower, more attentive way of looking. Moving beyond direct representation, the canvas becomes a site where physical matter and inner experience converge. Through rhythm, detail and layered visual structures, the paintings encourage moments of pause, sustained attention and an embodied experience of looking, returning the viewer to the body as a place of perception, sensation and reflection.