Michael Reid Southern Highlands is delighted to welcome back Holly Dormor to the gallery, with her collection of new work,  From the North. Since her sold out exhibition at Michael Reid Northern Beaches in 2024, collectors have been eagerly awaiting her next suite of paintings.

From the North is a continued exploration of light and its transformative nature.  “The harsh sun light from my northern windows has an extraordinary effect on a subject – particularly botanicals. Leaves illuminate or disappear into shadow, forming curious, high-contrast images I never tire of.”

Dormor is a visual artist working in Sydney NSW. Her work can be recognised through her use of light to reveal and conceal her subjects, forging a reflective look at ordinary botanicals. Dormor was a finalist in the 2023 National Emerging Art Prize and the 2023 Hunter’s Hill Art Prize. As a multidisciplinary artist she was a finalist in the 2015 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. Her work is held privately throughout Australia.

This November, Peta West and Miranda Hampson return to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with Vantage — the first time these two celebrated artists have exhibited together. The exhibition brings into focus the ways we see, remember, and interpret the land.

Lake Conjola–based printmaker Peta West unveils two of the most commanding works of her career — including the monumental Sweet Water. Across vast linocuts, carved line by line over hundreds of hours, West renders the landscape with masterful precision. “I’m constantly searching for ways to carve the landscape with depth,” she says, “so that when you look at the work, you feel as though you could step right into the reimagined vista before you.”

Her latest works were shaped after travelling through Central Australia, where studies of flora and topography became the foundation for these intricate, reimagined terrains — rolled by hand in Prussian blue ink onto fine Japanese paper. Once a photographer, West brings the same attuned sense of light and structure to her printmaking, carving for months to reveal flora and birdlife in astonishing detail. The result cements her as one of the foremost printmakers working in Australia today.

Miranda Hampson, an Anaiwan artist practising on Dharawal Country, follows her sold-out Lookaftering collection with new paintings that continue her exploration of Country and kin. Working in part with ochre sourced with permission from Elders, she creates pared-back compositions that hover between map and memory. Across their surfaces, fine lines recall the weave of baskets, while cracked and layered forms evoke salt plains and dry riverbeds — landscapes marked by endurance, history, and care.

Together, West and Hampson offer two vantage points on the Australian landscape — one carved, one painted — each a meditation on place, connection, and the patient act of seeing.

We are delighted to announce Clarity After the Storm, a new series of oil paintings by South Coast–based artist Ash Leslie. The works register the changing light that follows a storm, tracing a passage from turbulence to calm.

“This series of work was completed after a long period of stormy weather at the end of winter,” Leslie explains. “As the storm cleared I was taken with the way the sunlight illuminated the landscape in between the patches of passing fog and mist. With hints of spring on the horizon I felt a sense of clarity with the promise of the warm weather to come.”

Ash Leslie’s open-ended process embraces chance and discovery. Layers of oil paint coalesce into forms that hover on the edge of recognition, drifting through diaphanous washes of grey, moss, and blush.

Recognised across Australia, including finalist selections in the Paddington Art Prize, Flow Art Prize, and Signature Art Prize, Leslie has quickly established herself as a singular voice in contemporary abstraction. ‘Clarity After the Storm’ opens this weekend in the Mezzanine Gallery.

Images of the artist courtesy of Jessica Bellef

For her debut at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Isabelle Chouinard presents New Works — a title as spare and direct as the practice it reflects. It speaks to Chouinard as a technician quietly at work in the studio, methodically refining the fundamentals of her craft.

In New Works, Chouinard turns her attention to ordinary subjects — a head of garlic, a bowl of plums, a simple vessel — elevated through careful observation. Painting simply is deceptively difficult: here, colour lies within colour, light suffuses every form, and tonal harmonies are exquisitely resolved.

In Three Persimmons (2025), the orange of the fruit breathes softly against the delft-blue cloth beneath it, the hue suspended somewhere between solidity and air. In Capsicums (2025), the forms glow with inner light, while White Peaches (2025) transforms a tumbling arrangement into a study of velvety tone and delicate shading.

Chouinard’s approach is grounded in the atelier tradition and shaped by her study of the old masters, as well as a lifelong engagement with art history — an interest that reaches back to her earliest memories. “I used to watch my grandfather paint in his studio,” she reflects. “These days, I always look at art history, from Antiquity to the present day.”

She trained at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney, where she later taught still life and figure painting. Her studies also took her abroad — to the Atelier de Brésoles in Montreal and to France’s Studio Escalier under Timothy Stotz and Michelle Tully — extending the discipline cultivated at Julian Ashton and further embedding her work in the lineage of classical painting.

This rigorous practice has earned her wide recognition, both in Australia and abroad. She is currently a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award and has previously been a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award, the A.M.E. Bale Travelling Scholarship and Art Prize, and the Doug Moran Portrait Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Henry Jones Art Prize for her painting By the River.

We are delighted to share with you the inaugural Designers Edit from Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

This private link offers a curated overview of works by both established and emerging artists, spanning a range of mediums, scales, and approaches. Our intention is to provide you with a selection that might inspire – or indeed perfectly complement – your upcoming projects.

If a particular style or artist resonates, please don’t hesitate to be in touch. In many cases we are able to offer additional works from the same artist, and would be pleased to guide you further.

Lucy Vader returns to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with Weather Report, a major new exhibition extending across both the mezzanine and top floor galleries.

In this latest body of work, the Northern Rivers-based painter deepens her iconoclastic approach to the pastoral tradition. Weather Report gathers landscapes that seem to roil with shifting skies, rain-washed light, and sudden bursts of colour. Fields and paddocks stretch into distance, yet beneath their bucolic calm, Vader coaxes forth surges of painterly energy: skies dissolving into painterly abstraction, horizons blurred in atmospheric veils, unexpected eruptions of yellow, blue, and pink coursing through the scene like weather systems of their own.

“It’s wild and abstract,” Vader explains of her process. “I upset myself and I upset the canvas … I bash things out and then I try and calm it all down again so it becomes a patina of painting moments.” This restless rhythm produces works that hover between figuration and abstraction, their surfaces alive with the turbulence of mark-making.

The exhibition follows on from Vader’s recent celebrated series Exaltation in Sydney and Good Stock at Murrurundi, and confirms her place as one of the most vital painters of the pastoral working in Australia today.

In her debut exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Nicci Bedson paints the fibro cottages, brick veneer homes, and weatherboard cottages that defined the Australian suburban and semi-urban landscape after the Second World War. Rendered in meticulous detail, these buildings -once dismissed as ordinary- are given the halo of artistic attention, elevated as the structures that, for decades, cradled Australian lives.

“For me it’s about the house as architecture, as a marker of a certain time and place in history,” Bedson explains, “but also the house as a vessel for all the memories and lives lived inside.”

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is thrilled to welcome back to the upper level gallery Thirroul/Dharawal artist Anh Nguyen.  Of this new collection of still life and interiors paintings titled Rhymes with Orange, Nguyen says,  “I am thinking of rhymes that are not in sounds or words, and paintings that feel like something such as ‘orange’, a word famously considered to have no perfect rhyme in English. What does orange feel like? Synergies that are unexpected, pairings that are unusual, a mood that is warm, urgent, a state of change.”

“Anh Nguyen will paint anything that she can visually engage with.”, writes Amber Creswell Bell in her profile of the artist for Still Life (Thames & Hudson). “She recalls a quote from another painter, whose name she has long forgotten but whose words have stayed with her: ‘Still life is the thing that is close by, figures and portraits a little farther away, and landscape is in the distance or if you get up and walk a bit, she says. ‘It is all part of the observed world and ready for a curious magpie to eyeball.”

“While Anh will joke that still life is more forgiving than portraiture and more comfortable than plein-air landscape painting, what actually draws her to the genre is that it allows a number of different approaches. ‘It also feels very straightforward, a neutral canvas without pressure to introduce symbolism or narrative, she says.”

extract from Still. Life by Amber Creswell Bell published by Thames & Hudson