Sharon West is a visual artist working across various media including photography, painting, assemblage and digital media. She has been a teacher at the School of Art at RMIT University since 1999. West completed her Masters of Art at RMIT in 2009, exploring the relationships between settler and Indigenous cultures within Australian colonial art history. She has curated a number of exhibitions and exhibited nationally and internationally. This work was part of a series that portrayed mythical indigenous creatures, which West imagined to inhabit pre-settlement Melbourne. She constructs narrative-based scenarios that parody the concept of the museum diorama, featuring models of indigenous fauna and flora and domestic scenes of Koori people.
Navigating between Australia’s colonial narratives, West offers the viewer glimpses into re-imagined scenes from colonial settlement and the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land. West has exhibited at the Mornington RegionalArt Gallery and is currently exhibiting diorama work at the Counihan Gallery. In 2012 the State Library of Victoria purchased one of her works.