Miranda Joy Summers

Eora/Sydney-based painter Miranda Joy Summers works from sustained encounters with the Australian landscape, particularly the bushland and harbour foreshores of Sydney – in the creation of sprawling oil impasto works. 

Using a painting knife, Summers carves out the essence of water and land – the interplay between soluble and solid matter, negative and positive space, tumbling rock faces peeking through lacy thickets of foliage. Her knife strokes are deliberate, textural and expressive, drawing foreground and perceived distance into striking proximity and balancing the landscape’s visual density with the serene aura that is the sum of its parts.

Returning to her studio inside a rambling Victorian home wreathed by gardens on Sydney’s Lower North Shore – close to the Middle Harbour inlets where she captures much of her source material – Summers studies and manipulates her images, drawing over them with an iPad and playing with light and shadow. “Then I return to the site, revisit the atmosphere, take more photos and refine the emerging idea,” she says. “It’s a layered process of memory, observation and re-immersion. The final work is grounded in reality, but distilled through repeated looking, sensing and imagining.”

Summers has presented two solo exhibitions with Michael Reid: The Sound of Phthalo, her debut exhibition at Michael Reid Southern Highlands in 2025, and Rock Tree Flow at our Northern Beaches gallery. Both exhibitions were met with strong collector interest and sold out in their entirety.

To speak with a gallery representative about forthcoming works, register your interest via the link below: