Melbourne/Naarm-based painter Brittany Jones‘ modest subjects—measuring tapes, glassware, ceramic vessels and domestic implements—are drawn from the familiar world of the home and studio. Through meticulous observation, the artist reveals their often overlooked beauty and formal complexity.

While grounded in the traditions of still life painting, the works that comprise Held in Place also function as a form of surrogate portraiture. Jones, who was recognised as a finalist in the 2025 Archibald Prize, approaches her subjects with the same attentiveness she brings to the human figure. The objects she depicts bear the imprint of lives lived around them—the traces of touch, habit and ritual. They become stand-ins for their owners, suggesting lives beyond the frame.

At the heart of the exhibition is Jones’ remarkable sensitivity to the material world. Glass catches and disperses light with convincing luminosity; ceramics reveal subtle irregularities that speak to their handmade origins; a poppy stem is rendered with such precision that even the fine hairs lining its surface remain visible. Particularly compelling are her leadlight windows, where rippled panes fracture and distort the view beyond. Such passages speak to the precision of her painterly language.

Jones’ work has been recognised in a number of significant Australian art prizes, including the Portia Geach Memorial Award and STILL: National Still Life Award, where she received a Judges’ Commendation in 2025. She has also been shortlisted for the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, ACB Selects (National Emerging Art Prize), the Lethbridge 20,000 Small Scale Art Award, the Small Works Art Prize and the Kilgour Art Prize, and was a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize.

The paintings gathered in Poetry Within—an exhibition presented across Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Michael Reid Southern Highlands over July—reveal two complementary strands within Dalin Alejandrino’s practice.

At Newport, she turns towards the brightness of the coast. Blues, sea greens and pale washes of colour open the surface to light. In Berrima, the palette is swept into ochres, charcoal and muted greens, giving the work an earthbound presence. Seen together, the two exhibitions reveal an artist with a finely developed feel for the emotional possibilities of abstraction.

Alejandrino paints intuitively. Layers of acrylic and oil stick accumulate over the course of a studio session, moving between broad gestural flourishes and moments of close, staccato brushwork. Each mark responds to the last, so that a painting becomes a record of its own making rather than the pursuit of a predetermined image.

A horizon line, the edge of a ridge, light across water or a weather cell are suggested—obliquely—but never directly or literally described. “The environment and emotion are deeply tied for me,” she says. “There’s something in the act of layering that feels like uncovering both.”

A finalist in the 2024 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Alejandrino names Monet and Turner among her earliest influences. She returns to them for their handling of light—for the way atmosphere—a weeping sky, or a cloak of mist on the waterfront—can be worked into paint itself. For these masters, light was the organising force of their work, shaping its entire emotional tenor as surely as it carved and defined a cliffface.

Painting first became important to Alejandrino as a teenager. “Art was the visual language I could be expressive in,” she recalls. Growing up in a Khmer-Australian family in south-west Sydney, where her parents rebuilt their lives after arriving in Australia as refugees, she set those ambitions aside in favour of a more conventional career. She returned to painting after the birth of her daughter. “Painting was precious time to myself.” The simplicity of that remark is telling. The studio became a place where the demands of everyday life gave way to quiet—a whirring mind and a working brush.

Poetry Within marks Alejandrino’s first solo exhibition with Michael Reid, following her inclusion in the major group exhibition Quiet Tide at Michael Reid Northern Beaches in 2025.

To journey into Miranda Joy Summers’ home studio is to walk the winding halls and stairs of her rambling Victoria terrace – a gem of its time – edged with filigreed wrought iron lattice work that, in the late afternoon sun, throws a shadow of the design against the master bedroom, which, in fact, sleeps a giant easel and sprawling studio set up.

It is here that Miranda has dreamt up and committed to paint the work that forms Threshold – the artist’s third solo collection with Michael Reid – after an acclaimed run of collections in 2025 and early 2026, beginning with The Sound of Phthalo in the Southern Highlands, continuing with Rock Tree Flow in the Northern Beaches, and now culminating in this much-anticipated return to Berrima.

The Middle Harbour inlet is Miranda’s constant muse – observed by foot and by boat – a place of refuge, calm and, creatively speaking, an unending source of inspiration, as though she returns there by magnetic charge.

Often wielding a camera on her excursions, the artist will photograph what she sees, busily seeking out a quiet notch or well-balanced scene of moored boats bobbing on the calm waters, sending gentle ripples and distorting their own glassy reflections, or the dense bushland that clings to the harbourside, shooting up from rockfaces in deep green thickets.

It is the surface tricks of water that is one of the artist’s great pictorial fascinations – how they can be convincingly replicated with luscious, heaped oil paint, and how the idea of a perfect representation being ‘loosened’, made fluid, as we see in reflected forms in the water, has its exact parallel with oil impasto – the performance of this paint, which must necessarily distil exact forms to a matter of shapes and gestures.

The unique qualities of oil paint are deployed with magnificent effect across this suite, where each painting appears to radiate with the particular hour of day that is being depicted. We find certain works which flare with a golden hue, suggesting the breaking light of dawn or that last feeble hour of sunset, others in the crisp and saturating light of a high Australian noon.

“I prefer it when my source images are a little blurry,” she tells me on a walk along the harbour, passing charming wooden sailing clubs that cling to oyster-covered rocks and flanked by anchored boats with irreverent painted names. By having her reference images blurry, they are prepared for the kind of stylistic abbreviations and formal reductions that she will later achieve with oils on canvas.

On this day, the harbour was a show of light and colour, sparkling before us beneath a near cloudless mid-winter sky.

It is clear to see how this sublime part of Sydney has been so transformative for this emerging painter – a veritable magic show that occurs on repeat – from which she must put herself in the long service of discovering its tricks.

Returning to her studio, 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.”

It often feels that the imaginative potential of the harbour-side is only hemmed in by the simple fact of the dimension of her canvas – and even then, peaks and curls of impasto pigment hang off their outer edges, suggesting a scene still forming, and the canvas as a sculpted art object.

Indeed, the limits of the canvas are stretched further with Weightless and Buttery, pictures which, across two panels each, link seamlessly together such that they form a sweeping and breathtaking view, pieced together like a composite image.

With a knife, she trowels the paint in thick passages around the bushland and the waterfront homes that crane their necks out from the trees, before smoothing to an extremely fine treatment for her diaphanous skies and water.

Harnessing the full technical possibilities of oil paint – to accumulate into thick peaks and crests, or flatten into almost nothing – Miranda handles her brush with extraordinary technical virtuosity.

Threshold opens on July 30 and will be celebrated with an opening reception on August 15. To register your interest in an advance catalogue, or to arrange a private viewing appointment of these works, please email willkollmorgen@michaelreid.com.au

With Soliloquy, Brisbane-based oil painter Conor Knight makes his return to Michael Reid after nearly two years, presenting a suite of works across our Murrurundi and Southern Highlands spaces throughout June and July.

Knight depicts his floral subjects as boldly illuminated and set against spare grounds, such that the force of our attention rests on the elegance with which these still-life forms are depicted: the curve of a leaf, or the delicacy of a petal.

In this lighting, his subjects are endowed with an almost actorly grace, as though stage-lit and moments away from delivering a great monologue. “In theatre, a soliloquy is a window into the inner thoughts of a character,” says Knight. “These still life paintings use that concept to create works that touch on themes of intimacy, theatricality and solitude. Borrowing their titles from famous monologues and soliloquies, the collection explores feelings that sit between softness and unease.”

Always, there is attention to the gradations of tone changing across his forms as they turn towards and away from their light sources. The control of his brush, allowing it to deposit just enough paint to successfully record a form and then nothing more, gives each work a buoyancy and lightness.

On this level, he recalls one contemporary Australian master, Robert Malherbe. Further back, one can see that the artist is an eager student of history, with a deep respect for the traditions of Dutch and Flemish vanitas painting, albeit in a more gestural register and one less constrained by the pursuit of exact fidelity.

Also coursing through his work is a care for his medium which begins at its earliest stages, mulling his paints himself so that he has the most precise control possible over their viscosity and performance on the canvas. “I’ve really come to appreciate the unique quality of oil as the binding agent in paint,” Knight says. “Oil is able to hold light within. When light hits the surface of an oil painting, some of that light passes through the paint and reflects within the oil.”

In a stylistic flourish, Knight allows elements of the grisaille underpainting to poke through: a nod to the process itself, whereby a stable orange ground becomes the starting point and base colour upon which all others are applied. It is also very much an active element within the final composition, giving the work an almost weathered quality – as though uncovered after centuries.

If his botanical forms can be considered stars of the stage, characters of such devotion singing their arias, then concluding on the cuts of meat must be an undeniable and wry gesture: after the beauty, the meat of the scene, or its substance. Of course, by including the subject, Conor tells us that there is some underappreciated beauty in this subject too.

“My recent body of work is an exploration of scopophilia—an Ancient Greek term translating to the love of looking, or the aesthetic gratification derived from deep observation. While the word often carries psychological or sensual connotations, I find it perfectly captures the quiet, driving obsession at the heart of still life painting.”

Mirra Whale is a Sydney-based artist who has, over a matter of decades, established herself as one of the most beloved and admired still life painters and portraitists working in Australia.

A five-time Archibald finalist, Whale was recently the subject of an expansive survey exhibition at the Ngununggula regional art gallery, Scenes and Silence—a career milestone which, for the first time, saw key examples from the artist’s career positioned in conversation with each other, drawn from private collections across the country.

It was at Ngununggula that the widest arc of Whale’s practice—and her studied devotion to simple scenes, populated by utilitarian vessels and clipped botanicals—became clearer than ever. Hers is an artist’s life devoted to the beauty and staying power of those items and arrangements around us; our pursuit of grace in the domestic interior.

“The subjects of these paintings are intentionally intimate, drawn entirely from the immediate sanctuary of my home and studio. There is no manufactured grandeur here; instead, I find beauty in the overlooked and the familiar. Flowers are gathered from kerbside foraging, fruit rests on my kitchen counter, and cherished objects have travelled alongside me for decades, carrying the invisible weight of memory and time.”

Whale, in life as in art, remains deeply humble, and her practice is a private devotion to form and technique.

When Scenes and Silence was presented alongside an important travelling collection by Clarice Beckett from the National Gallery of Australia, the resonance between these painters was immediately felt. Between them, a serious and disciplined search for beauty—enthral to its force, and the sheer joy of a well-done surface.

“To truly look at an object is an act of pure pleasure,” she says. “The deliberate interplay of light and shadow, the geometry of form, and the texture of a surface are not merely subjects to be recorded; they are the very essence of seeing. Through these paintings, I want to reclaim the act of looking as a form of slow, meditative joy.”

Whale’s studio is a bustling, frenzied space of work and study, tubes and ornamented bowls jostling for space, and a shelf which is, in the Margaret Preston sense, her ‘laboratory’, around which her forms are arranged and tested.

A clear hallmark of a Mirra Whale painting is the tabletop, seen from the slightly elevated or directly side-profile view, atop which tablecloths are left to bunch, crease and drape, ostensibly ‘scoring’ the scene, or setting a kind of soft, geometric grid, almost like the lines of sheet music, and her vessels, the written notes.

It’s this fundamental order and balance that grounds the work, gives it solidity and firmness—and, when actually viewed together, it is as though Mirra is painting on a table that extends for miles; a table that stretches beyond the frame, and has provided the scaffold for her work throughout her career.

Sacred in the Ordinary is, as Mirra writes, “an invitation to slow, to step into my studio, and to share in the profound, instinctual pleasure of simply looking.” It is an invitation we accept in a heartbeat.

With great dexterity and patience, Susan Morris paints the beloved forms of Australian botanical still life. Banksias, flowering gums, eucalyptus and proteas are gathered into vessels, their branches twisting, reaching and, at times, almost spilling beyond the picture plane. Against simplified grounds—often a single field of colour—the arrangements are allowed to stand on their own terms. In doing so, Morris evokes Margaret Preston’s notion of still life as a laboratory in which the fundamental concerns of painting may be tested.

The artist’s subjects are bathed in a soft, diffuse light that settles evenly across every leaf and stem, describing their distinctive forms while never losing the texture and vitality of the painted surface. Drawn indoors, these clippings and branches enter the artist’s intimate world of vases and vessels—some spare and utilitarian, others embellished with painted motifs. Morris always paints from life. Reference photographs may be taken as a practical necessity – but her aim is to retain a painterly immediacy, keeping the scene alive to both eye and hand.

Morris moves effortlessly between dramatically darkened grounds and luminous, high-key compositions. The former recall the tradition of Dutch still-life painting, their finely handled forms emerging from cloistered, atmospheric spaces where sprays of yellow wattle seem almost to glow from within the darkness. The latter embrace clarity and openness, allowing branches, buds and blossoms to unfold with measured precision against fields of light.

Nested within the exhibition’s title is the idea of accidental discovery—a sudden and welcome surprise. While combing through a tangle of leaves, one chances upon a beautiful flower. Encountering this collection feels much the same.

Elizabeth Beaumont’s studio is an iron shed nestled amongst the undulating hillsides of the Southern Highlands—the place she calls home.

Its corrugated exterior suggests a storehouse for machinery – but inside is a world of creative experimentation: creased and worn books; illustrated guides to Australian native botanicals—one devoted entirely to Acacias of New South Wales, wrapped in a delicious yellow cover; a library of pigments; makeshift palettes; canvases leaning in varying states of completion, some hoisted high upon the wall. At the centre of it all stands the artist herself: brush in hand, Blundstones on.

Elizabeth Beaumont was one of the very first artists to exhibit at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, when our program was barely a few months old. Her debut collection, Everlasting, marked a significant turning point in her early career.

The immediate success of that exhibition gave Beaumont the confidence to pursue a full-time practice. Since then, she has presented two further solo exhibitions and featured in a number of significant group presentations. With each exhibition, her work has grown in assurance, establishing a distinctive voice within contemporary Australian abstraction.

Each of Beaumont’s paintings is anchored by mark-making at once broad and fluttering, and tonal decisions that celebrate the honey yellows and rich earth spectrum of her local landscape. The painterly arabesques and flecks of pigment suggest a place in flux, rippling with life.

One of the great strengths of abstract painting is its capacity to preserve the movements of its creation. Every gesture, revision and hesitation remains embedded within the finished surface. Rather than pursuing a figurative likeness, abstraction allows an artist to distil experience to its essentials: travelling lines scoring a canvas, layered colour, and the multitude of associations these simple elements can evoke.

In Beaumont’s case, the Australian bush remains her constant muse. Across these twelve paintings is the unmistakable sensation of being immersed within it: deep amongst the shrubs, breathing in the scent of eucalyptus, brushing past strawflowers, experiencing the landscape in all of its peacefulness and frenzied motion.

It is a landscape that rewards close looking. A place that can feel, all at once, both busy and quiet.