Paisley mural artist Shaun Devenney, the man behind the Sma' Shot Day mural on the corner of Neilston Road and South Campbell Street, opens his first solo exhibition in Australia this week.

The show, called Still, Life, opens in Melbourne on Friday 30 October. It's built around 20 paintings of his home town, including scenes of Neilston Road and Causeyside Street, which he painted in Paisley before they were flown around 16,000km to Australia.

Paintings that change like memories

Since arriving in Melbourne, Shaun has reworked every one of them. He has painted over sections, scraped details away and, in some cases, removed whole parts of the original picture.

The idea is to mirror the way memories of a place behave when you're away from it: some parts stay sharp while others fade or shift. Shaun has spent the last few years moving between Scotland and Melbourne, and he says the paintings started as recognisable Paisley places before he began "scraping things away and sometimes almost completely losing the original image."

Alongside the reworked canvases, the exhibition shows photographs of the paintings as they were before they left Scotland, along with everyday objects he brought over from Paisley. Together they're meant to get visitors thinking about how the things we carry with us can hold on to, or change, our sense of home.

He says you don't need to move across the world to recognise the feeling, because even going back to the place you grew up can feel strange when you notice how much has changed.

From Paisley gable ends to Australian festivals

The Melbourne show follows a solo exhibition in Glasgow in 2025. Shaun's work has taken him across Scotland, Southeast Asia and Australia, including the Darwin Street Art Festival in 2024 and the Frankston Street Art Festival this year.

Closer to home, he's known for his Sma' Shot Day mural in Paisley, which he self-funded to mark 40 years since the parade's revival, and for a large mural at the corner of West Nile Street and Bath Street in Glasgow.

So if you're in Melbourne, or know someone who is, there's a little bit of Paisley on show there from Friday.