Mountain Made

Mountain Made is a new series of exuberant botanical paintings by Louise Frith, returning the Eora/Sydney-based artist to the Southern Highlands with some of the most immersive works of her career to date. Building on the creative breakthrough of her celebrated Murrurundi exhibitions Understory and Tendrils and Tapestries, along with her debut collection at Michael Reid Sydney last year, Frith’s latest paintings delve deep into the bushland surrounding Pierce’s Pass in Blue Mountains National Park. Sketching in the field before returning to the studio, the artist closely observes the dense floral interplay of the landscape, its tangled undergrowth and resilient plant life emerging through sandstone cracks and beneath the canopy.

Moving with painterly gusto between passages of intricate, tightly controlled detail and moments of untamed, impressionistic abundance, Frith’s dazzling profusions of native wildflowers teem and grow to the very edge of the canvas. “Most people are enthralled by the big views, looking down the valleys, marvelling at the escarpment,” says the artist, “but I’m charmed by the details at my feet.” 

The works in Mountain Made are deeply informed by the cycles of destruction and regeneration that shape the Australian landscape. Pierce’s Pass was severely affected by the 2020 bushfires, and Frith recalls how visitors spoke of an eerie silence after the burn, a landscape emptied of birdsong and the usual din of the ecosystem. Returning in recent summers, however, she found the terrain transformed once more: “If you visit now, the landscape is thriving and the thrum of cicadas is deafening. It is full of life again,” says the artist. In this respect, the exhibition becomes a meditation on regrowth and renewal, celebrating the resilience and restorative power of the Australian bush within one of the country’s most sublime landscapes.

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