A leading voice within the dynamic school of contemporary painters at Iwantja Arts – co-founded in the 1980s by her late mother, revered artist and advocate Kunmanara (Sadie) Singer – Trisha Singer’s solo show commences while her joint exhibition with PRISCILLA SINGER – her sister and fellow luminary of Iwantja Arts – continues its run at Michael Reid Sydney.

Our Berrima and Eora/Sydney galleries’ concurrent presentations of the Singer Sisters’ new suite of paintings – titled ‘Tali Ngura Wiru – Beautiful Sandhill Country’ as a tribute to the rocky desert country of Indulkana, where Iwantja is sited – celebrate the cross-generational sharing of cultural knowledge, stories and practices grounded in Country and kinship that is the animating force in their art-making.

“I’ve been making art since I was a young girl,” says Singer, whose work channels the vivid desert reds and earth tones of Yankunytjatjara Country through sweeping gestures crested by meandering, sand-coloured striations. “You can see sandhills in the colours I use… desert colours, with dusty reds and oranges.”

Singer’s practice honours personal and cultural connections to place, carrying forward stories and lessons passed down through family and community. “There’s a lot of my mum in my work – what she liked and what she taught me,” says the artist. “I like looking at different flowers and going on Country, getting the knowledge of the land and the story passed on from grandparents … When you travel, you see the changes in the land. It comes alive.”

Singer previously presented her work at Michael Reid Southern Highlands alongside her sister and other Iwantja peers in the group exhibition ‘Ngura Pilunpa – Peaceful Country’. With her practice now being celebrated in Sydney, we are thrilled to welcome her back to Berrima for the Southern Highlands contingent of ‘Tali Ngura Wiru’.

The enduring muse of Cameilia Grace Edwards is the Australian landscape at dusk—caught in that fleeting interval of golden hour. The resulting effects are distinctly cinematic: resplendent beams of light wash across the surface; wild tangles of roadside vegetation are sometimes obscured by painted ‘lens flares’; and backgrounds are positioned out of focus, resembling bokeh.

Often encountered on journeys home, these landscapes prompt Edwards to pause and record the moment before faithfully locating it on the canvas. What begins as a fast, impromptu act of looking becomes a sustained meditation. Soul-piercing in their beauty, the scenes offer the artist endless potential as a subject.

Elegance and harmony emerge through her attention to changing light and atmospheric conditions, and through an indefatigable interest in the chromatic range produced by weather, time, and the angle of the sun.

Edwards paints from a shared studio in her hometown of Inverell, NSW, where her easel sits beside the front window. Locals often pause to wave, watch, or step inside for a conversation—moments of connection that have become a treasured part of her practice. “This visibility has transformed what can be a solitary process into something communal.” At the heart of her work is a wish to hold space for calm: “a pause, a breath, and a sense of still wonder.”

A 2024 finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, Zaide Harker’s paintings pulse with urgency, shaped by lived experience and expressed through an unguarded, physical engagement with paint. 

A diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease and a lifelong engagement with the disability support community deeply inform Harker’s practice. Their paintings are shaped by both the embodied experience of neurodegeneration and the personal history of caring for affected family members. This layered perspective rejects fear-based narratives around disability and instead affirms complexity, power, and grace.

The works presented here centre on loosely held still-life arrangements: flowering stems, clustered blooms, and weighty vessels that appear to buckle slightly under the pressure of their own making. Sunflower heads, protea-like forms, and curling pink and white blooms are constructed from dense slabs of oil, their surfaces ridged and striated with gesture. Colour is laid on generously — yellows, greens, creams, and bruised pinks folding into one another — creating fleshy, tactile surfaces that hold the record of the artist’s hand. 

Studio Imagery: Liv Bridge

Across the Top, Mezzanine and Ground Floors, Michael Reid Southern Highlands showcases a diverse program of Australian art, reflecting a breadth of practice, medium and perspective.

The works presented here — by India Mark, Evan Shipard, Vicki Potter, Diane Kemarre Ross, Beverley Pula Luck, Stacey Mrmacovski, Julianne Ross Allcorn and Peta West — comprise a tightly curated grouping, selected to highlight the range and depth of the gallery’s current program.

From the earliest days of our exhibition program, the Artists of Ampilatwatja have held a vital place at Michael Reid Southern Highlands. Working from their community on Alyawarr Country, approximately 320 kilometres north-east of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), these artists produce intricately layered paintings grounded in deep knowledge of land, culture and continuity. Their works map waterholes, bush medicines, desert flora and ancestral pathways through luminous fields of colour, and are held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Holmes à Court Collection.

The work of Ampilatwatja artists gives form to cultural knowledge passed down across generations. The paintings articulate specific places and stories, embedded in lived experience and cultural responsibility. While some knowledge remains protected, what is shared speaks clearly of connection, care and continuity. Today, Ampilatwatja painting is recognised as a significant and enduring contribution to contemporary Aboriginal art, sustained by artists ranging from young practitioners to senior Elders, and grounded in a deep relationship to Country.

Apmer – home is land and land is home features the work of Rita Pitjara Beasley, Nancy Pitjara Frank, Beverly Pula Luck, Diane Kemarre Ross, Selina Pula Teece.

For his Michael Reid debut, Evan Shiphard has turned his attention to the bucolic Southern Highlands — to the Wingecarribee River at first light, to mist-laden paddocks, to stands of trees rising through morning fog.

Shipard’s practice sits in clear dialogue with the lineage of Australian Impressionism, particularly the work of Arthur Streeton and his circle. Like Streeton, Tom Roberts and Louis Abrahams (to name but a few), Shipard works through sustained engagement with place, returning repeatedly to the same sites to observe the shifting effects of light, season and atmosphere. Coming from a background in the film industry — where defining the establishing shot was often his role — the landscape presents a natural progression. The impulse is cinematic, but the resolution is painterly.

The familiar shimmering palette of the Australian landscape recurs throughout these works, as does an emphasis on space and distance: rivers winding, trees acting as vertical anchors, and the land opening gradually into air and light. Shipard’s brushwork is active and responsive — at times stippled and broken, at others broader and more assured — while skies are animated through layered, mannered passages of cloud and morning fog. These qualities recall Streeton’s own delight in the physical act of painting outdoors.

“The Highlands never ceases to inspire- the seasons change with such splendour and there is always an evocative quality to the place especially in the early morning light or the fading of golden hour into dusk. It whispers timeless melodies from the winding Wingeecaribee to the remote trails, waterfalls and wetlands.”

Gunning, NSW is a place of enduring personal significance for Emily Gordon. She has travelled here with her family for many years, returning again and again to this gorgeous landscape.  Across this small suite of works, Gordon charts the paddocks, tree lines, winding roads and bodies of water around Gunning with the same acuity she brings to urban facades. Eucalypts rise pale and rhythmic against broad skies; roads curve gently through dry grasslands; reflections double the world in still pools.

What links Quieter Ground to Gordon’s cityscapes is her enduring commitment to Australian light as a structuring force.  In Paddington and The Rocks, light falls across architectural planes—staircases, rooftops, terraces stepping downhill. Here, light behaves differently. It is ecological and spatial: moving laterally through sky, repeating across tree trunks. Ochres, golds and muted greens replace the gelato tones of the city, yet Gordon’s palette remains alert and finely calibrated.

A sustained intimacy with the landscape is felt throughout Quieter Ground. Scale plays an important role. Working on an intimate register allows Gordon to distil each composition to its essentials. If Paddington Stories emerged from sustained urban wandering, Quieter Ground feels anchored in stillness and return: a body of work attentive to the slower disclosures of a place known over time.  Quieter Ground ultimately affirms Emily Gordon as a painter of place in the fullest sense—equally attuned to the city’s charged complexity and to the restrained, durational poetry of the regional landscape.

Julia Flanagan’s debut exhibition with Michael Reid unfolds in vivid, jubilant cadences of colour, pattern and form, and reveals an artist working at full stretch within a language she has made her own. The paintings seem animated by the same rhythm: lines curve, return and cross themselves, slipping between foreground and background as though intent on binding the works together. Many begin as drawings – quick, provisional notations made at a domestic table or studio bench – before widening into fields of paint. From there, fragments are enlarged, spliced, rephrased; a sliver from an earlier canvas becomes the seed of the next. Quilting squares, remembered from her mother’s sewing, offer geometric ballast, though that order is soon unsettled by curves and arcs that dip and weave like the thread pulled through cloth. The result is a choreography of parts – disciplined, but never still.

It is our great pleasure to welcome Dharawal multi-disciplinary artist Amy Cuneo to our top floor gallery this coming January. Cuneo’s subjects link us to essential and reassuring elements in our lives including familiar objects, flowers and tender depictions of domestic scenes.

For her collection Spread  Cuneo says “These paintings have taken their form while considering how we spread our attention, affection and energy in everyday life. Domestic demands as a caregiver continue but within these parameters I have scope to play, imagine and enjoy. These works are an invitation to attend the lives we have in front of us- colour filled and complex.”  

Cuneo has shown widely in NSW and Tasmania and has been a finalist in several art prizes including FLOW (2019/2023) and the Fisher’s Ghost (2023). Her work is included in various private collections throughout Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and has been collected by Tiers & Co Collecting Group