ANCA Artist Profile - Micky Allan Painter   Micky Allan Night 2  2005 Engraved, acid etched glass, acrylic, over pastel, pencil, on paper. 57 x 145 x 2 cm MICKY ALLAN (NADA CELESTE) Micky has been exhibiting since 1975 both in Australia and overseas and has work in all State galleries, the Australian National Gallery, and in many private collections including the Bailleu-Myer Foundation, Allen Allen & Hemsley, Baker & McKenzie, Mallesons Stephen Jacques, Vitrex-Camden and Philip Morris. She has been awarded several grants by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, including a stay at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. She was one of eight artists chosen to represent Australia in an exhibition touring South-East Asia in 1991 and was selected for the exhibition Spirit and Place - Art in Australia 1861-1996 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, for TECCA 2 at the NGV in 1996 and for A Prova de Agua Waterproof at the Belem Cultural Centre, Lisbon in 1999. In recent years she has been commissioned to paint various murals for public, business and private spaces, both in Australia and overseas. Micky was recently awarded a grant for new work from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for an exhibition with the working title Infinity and the Everyday. She currently teaches at the ANU School of Art. In 2000 she changed her name to Nada Celeste but still exhibits as Micky Allan. Her present work includes shelf paintings -found objects placed on shelves in front of fresco panels-, engraved glass overlays -engraved plate glass placed over velvet or mixed media works on paper- oil paintings and installation. Much of the exploration of the numinous in the contemporary debate so far has concentrated on the abstract.  Besides the question What happens at the interface of the numinous and the everyday?, she likes to ask Do the processes of transformation into the non-visible necessarily have to be abstract? and to explore in her art work the parallel space of the immaterial as it interacts with daily living and the natural world. She likes to create reflective spaces in which the viewer's imagination can roam and feel free. The infinite -expressed through colour, nuance, symbol, dissolving boundaries, a sense of experiential boundlessness- and the everyday -expressed through natural or made objects, real or represented; of toys, animals, birds or fish, devotional and other figures from various cross-cultural contexts, science and space images and other memorabilia- interact with longing, shock, pleasure, tension, humour and pain. Or in unexpected synthesis establishing equivalence and space for hope.