Esoteric Lore

In the two years since Dharawal-based painter and Anaiwan woman Miranda Hampson appeared in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, her practice has gained remarkable momentum. In 2026 alone, she was selected as a finalist for the Hadley’s Art Prize, Mosman Art Prize, Goulburn Art Award and Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, receiving the inaugural Installers’ Choice Award at Mosman.

Hampson’s paintings combine considerable technical accomplishment with a sustained interest in material, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. Esoteric Lore, following her 2025 exhibition Vantage, extends this enquiry through an increasingly delicate and exacting language of paint. Across some of the largest canvases of her career, minute marks accumulate into filaments, ripples and dense fields, giving the surfaces a quality that is at once woven, organic and impossibly weightless.

The fishing net provides the collection’s central image. In certain works, it is recognisable as an object, suspended against a neutral ground or caught in shadow. Elsewhere, it spreads across the canvas, becoming almost abstract and, in places, suggestive of cracked earth. For Hampson, the net offers a compelling way of considering Country as a system of interconnected relationships. “Fish traps do not resist movement entirely; they work with currents, migration and seasonal change,” she says.

There is something apt, too, in the way the net is made. Each line depends upon the next, as thread depends upon thread. Hampson recreates this structure entirely in paint, and beneath that lies the linen canvas itself, already woven. There are, in other words, several kinds of making held within a single surface: the weave of the canvas, the weave of the net, and the ‘stitching’ of paint.

This same kind of thinking is extended, with similar rigour, across other phenomena and subject matter, all suggestive, in some way, of a balanced coexistence with Country, or a call to repair these missing links.

The long strands of kelp in The Shape We Take bend with currents and tides, dancing in response to the water around them, bringing a distinctly more fluid kind of reciprocity to the fore. “The organisms that sustain the world are often the least visible,” says Hampson. “Like phytoplankton and kelp, they remind us that life persists through countless acts of exchange and connection beyond our immediate view.”