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
