Mountain Made is a new series of exuberant botanical paintings by Louise Frith, returning the Eora/Sydney-based artist to the Southern Highlands with some of the most immersive works of her career to date. Building on the creative breakthrough of her celebrated Murrurundi exhibitions Understory and Tendrils and Tapestries, along with her debut collection at Michael Reid Sydney last year, Frith’s latest paintings delve deep into the bushland surrounding Pierce’s Pass in Blue Mountains National Park. Sketching in the field before returning to the studio, the artist closely observes the dense floral interplay of the landscape, its tangled undergrowth and resilient plant life emerging through sandstone cracks and beneath the canopy.

Moving with painterly gusto between passages of intricate, tightly controlled detail and moments of untamed, impressionistic abundance, Frith’s dazzling profusions of native wildflowers teem and grow to the very edge of the canvas. “Most people are enthralled by the big views, looking down the valleys, marvelling at the escarpment,” says the artist, “but I’m charmed by the details at my feet.” 

The works in Mountain Made are deeply informed by the cycles of destruction and regeneration that shape the Australian landscape. Pierce’s Pass was severely affected by the 2020 bushfires, and Frith recalls how visitors spoke of an eerie silence after the burn, a landscape emptied of birdsong and the usual din of the ecosystem. Returning in recent summers, however, she found the terrain transformed once more: “If you visit now, the landscape is thriving and the thrum of cicadas is deafening. It is full of life again,” says the artist. In this respect, the exhibition becomes a meditation on regrowth and renewal, celebrating the resilience and restorative power of the Australian bush within one of the country’s most sublime landscapes.

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The story behind this exhibition is a positive one — a shaft of sunlight cutting through the noise and shadow of world events that can seem beyond our control. Back From The Brink is a reminder that, with enough goodwill, good science, and community effort, we can pull back from the edge — and that this is worth celebrating.

Fiona Smith’s paintings honour the work of conservationists and communities who have fought to rescue bird species from extinction. She is painting birds that almost weren’t here.

Every species in this exhibition was, at some point, heading towards oblivion — reduced to dozens of individuals, their habitats destroyed, their futures a ticking timebomb. But thanks to the global conservation movement, here they are: surviving, sometimes thriving, and depicted among a fiesta of flowers.

Among them, Brazil’s Lear’s Macaw — that vivid blue jewel of the caatinga cliff faces — was down to just 60 individuals in the early 1980s. Today, there are more than 2,500. The majestic Trumpeter Swan, hunted almost to extinction across North America, now fills the skies of the great northern wetlands in its thousands. In New Zealand, whole islands have been cleared of introduced predators so that birds found nowhere else on Earth have somewhere safe to raise their young.

Since 2000, 25 bird species have stepped back from the Critically Endangered list. Of course, this is a drop in the ocean compared to the ongoing loss of species worldwide — but what these stories deliver is proof of something vital: that humans have the ability to repair some of the damage we have caused. That we are better off saving this planet — the only one we have — than ditching it to hitch a ride on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketship to Mars.

This collection is determinedly joyful and playful. It focuses on beauty and wonder. Each painting carries a name that translates as “hope” in a different language.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the reassurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965). Carson, a marine biologist and naturalist, is best known for her 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the devastating environmental effects of pesticide use — particularly DDT — on birds and ecosystems, and helped ignite the modern conservation movement.

Showing this month at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Placeheld gathers ten painters working within the landscape, each bringing a distinct sensibility to the question of place. Together, the exhibition offers a timely survey of some of the most compelling voices shaping landscape painting in Australia today. Placeheld features new work by Anh Nguyen, Anthea Stead, Cate Maddy, Kate Vella, Libby Wakefield, Meg Walters, Sam Wilkinson, Suzie Riley, Tara Price and Zoe Grey.