For fifteen years, Arzu Meily has been quietly cultivating a practice that defies easy categorisation. Painter, sound artist, therapist, workshop facilitator, and tech entrepreneur; she embodies all of these roles, yet refuses to be defined by any single one. “I move between mediums and disciplines freely; the work demands the form, not the other way around,” she says.
Born in Australia to Iranian parents, Meily’s dual heritage shapes her vision. She describes this hyphenation not as a limitation but as fertile ground- a space of translation, displacement, and synthesis. Her art channels these experiences, exploring questions of belonging, cultural fluidity, and the unseen architectures of human experience.
“Curiosity drives me,” she says. “I follow the thread of what fascinates me-whether it’s painting, sound, therapy, or tech. I don’t create for an audience; I create to understand the world and myself.”
For Meily, art is never a commodity. “It’s a map of the self,” she explains, “a tool for discovery, a way to navigate what we’ve been through, and to imagine where we’re going.” Her practice is daring in its refusal to settle, courageous in its constant transformation, and deeply attuned to the porous spaces between disciplines, cultures, and modes of being.
Art and Therapy: An Interwoven Practice
Arzu Meily, The imperfect Perfect, Digital Photograph, 2015
Meily’s practice emerges from a rare convergence of disciplines: a Bachelor and Honours in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney (2010–2014) and a Master’s in Art Therapy from Western Sydney University (2018–2021). “I was studying psychology before transitioning to art therapy,” she reflects. “I realised conventional approaches often reduced human experience to categories. Art therapy offered a language capable of holding complexity, nuance, and emotion in their full depth.”
A professional member of ANZACATA (Australian & New Zealand Arts Therapy Association) and PACFA (Psychotherapy & Counselling Federation of Australia), Meily navigates a unique intersection of clinical insight and artistic experimentation. For her, therapy and art are not separate pursuits, they are in constant dialogue. The psychotherapeutic process deepens her engagement with perception, memory, and emotion, while her artistic experiments return to inform therapeutic practice, offering new ways of imagining, feeling, and connecting. Each discipline amplifies the other, creating a feedback loop of inquiry, reflection, and transformation.
A Multipotentialist Vision
In her most recent sonic project ARMEI, sound becomes a vessel for memory and emotion- a way to “paint without a surface,” as she puts it. Photography, sculpture, painting, and digital media are not mere tools but instruments of inquiry, each probing consciousness and tracing the invisible logics that govern perception, memory, and being. Her work exists in the liminal spaces where form, thought, and feeling intersect, creating experiences that are at once intimate, expansive, and uncannily precise.
For Meily, the act of making is inseparable from the act of being. “You don’t plan it; it just happens. Something wants to exist through you, and you get out of the way,” she reflects. For her, curiosity is not an accessory, it is the scaffolding of her practice.
Exceeding Contemporary Boundaries
Arzu Meily, Mass production, Acrylic on canvas, 2018
Meily’s work lives at the intersection of art, therapy, and culture. Her pieces feel alive; layered, responsive, and always shifting, and she blurs the lines between artist and audience, therapist and participant, sound and image, past and future. Her Iranian-Australian heritage is central to her perspective. “Being hyphenated means living between worlds, navigating connection and translation,” she says. That experience shapes everything she makes. Through painting, sculpture, photography, sound, and digital media, she explores memory, identity, and culture, creating work that feels deeply personal but speaks across borders and communities.
Looking Forward
Arzu Meily, Selective stupidity, Neon light installation, 2024
In a world where everything seems designed to divide, Meily believes art remains the one language capable of uniting. Her private work delves deeply into memory, emotion, and the invisible structures of consciousness, while her workshops and collaborations invite others to access that same inner terrain. She sees her practice as a channel, not to impose, but to guide- helping people reconnect with their intuition, creativity, and authentic selves. “Art isn’t just about making objects,” she says, “it’s a way to explore yourself, to understand your inner landscape. If we can access that together, we can begin to live in a more connected, authentic world.” In this way, her work bridges the personal and the collective, the private and the public, turning creation into a shared language of human experience.
Arzu Meily invites us into her world not as spectators, but as participants. Her art asks us to pause, reflect, and inhabit the spaces between creation and healing, image and sound, heritage and self. Fifteen years of quiet practice have honed a voice that is both disciplined and restless, intimate and expansive, conceptual and deeply human. Crossing her threshold is an invitation: to see, feel, and perhaps discover the uncharted territories of our own consciousness.
To explore more of Arzu Meily’s work and follow her artistic journey, visit @armeiart on Instagram.
