Sharnaé Beardsley is a Christchurch-based artist who graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Whitecliff College of Arts and Design in 2012. Currently her work repurposes the venerable genre of flower painting for a contemporary context – in particular, orchids. The orchid flower is viewed as the symbol of the relationship between nature and culture as humans have historically contributed to their evolution by interfering with their form and colour. This obsession which our human culture has with the desire to control and cultivate nature, very much informs the art practice of Sharnaé.

Highlights of Sharnaé’s practice include; winning the viewer’s choice for the Arts Gold Award in 2013, and being a finalist in a number of prestigious art awards – the most recent being at the Edinburgh Premier Art Awards at the Otago Arts Society, where the judge gave a special mention of her painting Adaption 13. In 2016, Felicity Milburn, Lead Curator at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, wrote an essay on her art and practice in Takahē Magazine titled: The Secret Life of Plants. In 2019, Francis McWhannell wrote: Inducing blooms: Some notes apropos of an Orchid by Sharnaé Beardsley. Also in 2019, Sharnaé was featured in a nation-wide touring exhibition titled Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s Legacy produced by the Embassy of Sweden and Solander Gallery, and later that year she held her first solo exhibition titled Orchidelirum. 

Sharnaé has artworks in numerous private collections both in New Zealand and overseas, including the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū collection. She continues to paint part-time from her studio in New Brighton, Christchurch.