Rather than depicting Altyerr (the sacred Dreaming narratives) these artists turn their attention to the living surface of Country itself. Their paintings unfold as expansive, multi-view fields, eschewing conventional perspective to allow every element to be encountered with equal presence. Ghost gums, spinifex, wildflowers and stands of bush medicine emerge in rhythmic constellations of colour.

These works celebrate Arreth, the medicinal and sustaining properties of the land, and the intergenerational knowledge that surrounds it. Often painted while on Country, the canvases carry both immediacy and continuity—fields of blossoms and desert growth rendered with patience and precision. Together, they offer a considered expression of one of the most distinctive painting traditions in contemporaryAustralian art.

Where We Sit, from Naarm/Melbourne based painter Lily Platts sees her return to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with a suite of paintings depicting her perennial muse, the chair. Exploring the incidental compositions she comes across in everyday life, such as: on the side of the road, at garage sales, in op shops and online marketplaces. These everyday objects become the starting point for the work. She explores materiality throughout the series, expanding her practice into ceramics while returning to painting with oils. Working across these materials has brought experimentation and developing new techniques back into her process.

The artist is often asked, ‘Why chairs?’ She has been drawn to the motif for many years, particularly because of the sense of humanity that everyday objects can hold. Chairs can reveal something about the people, places and moments they have been part of, even when we know nothing about their history.
“We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by new things, and where objects can feel easily replaceable and disposable.’

Through these paintings, Platts is interested in slowing
this down and considering the value we place on the objects around us. The works invite us to look again at everyday things and think about the memories, histories and experiences they might hold.

Platts has been a finalist in the 2025 BAMM Biennale Portrait Prize, 2023 National Emerging Art Prize and the Grace Cossington Smith Art Prize. She was a recipient of the 2020 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship after graduating with Honours from RMIT. For priority access, please register your interest.

In October, Anaiwan painter u003cstrongu003eMiranda Hampsonu003c/strongu003e will return to the Southern Highlands following her celebrated u003cemu003eVantageu003c/emu003e collection late last year. In u003cemu003eEsoteric Loreu003c/emu003e, Hampson paints intricate woven forms, drawing on the patterns of nets, bags and fish traps, their fine lines accumulating into patterns of remarkable density and movement.rnrnLiving and practising on Dharawal Country, Hampson has, in 2026 alone, been selected for four leading art prizes: the Hadley’s Art Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, where she received an Installers’ Choice Award, the King’s School Art Prize and the Fishers Ghost Art Award. Taken together, these appearances mark a significant year for Hampson and a growing recognition of her place within contemporary Australian painting.

Having established herself as one of the most distinctive painters of Sydney’s built landscape, Emily Gordon returns to the Southern Highlands this November with Homecoming. In Miller’s Point and the Rocks, she finds a particularly rich subject, capturing the eclectic jumble of Victorian rooftops and gelato-toned terraces that spill down the suburb’s slopes. Bathed in golden light and broken by the shadows of fronds and flowering trees, her elegant facades, quiet backstreets and finely observed architectural details are punctuated by glimpses of Sydney Harbour.

Reflecting on memory, emotion and the landscapes onto which we project our inner worlds, Irene Crowe’s moody and meditative paintings find luminous skies unfolding above abstracted terrain, with familiar places transformed by recollection, longing and the half-light of memory.

“This body of work continues my exploration of how our personal memories and cultural histories shape our experiences of landscapes,” says Crowe, whose paintings are less concerned with recording a particular place than distilling the emotional resonance it leaves behind. “My work has always been a way for me to process emotions, often capturing the tenderness and nostalgia of a place visited either on my travels or sometimes in dreams.”

Created against a backdrop of significant personal change, ‘Nocturne’ follows Crowe’s move from the Sydney home whose skies and harbour light had become embedded in her visual imagination. “This period of change was so rapid that I was only able to recognise it once we had already moved through it,” she says. “These feelings intensified while I was going through ongoing challenges with fertility. Art-making became so important as I found myself thinking deeply about creation and how little control we sometimes have over the things we want most. These works do not seek to resolve that uncertainty, rather it became a place to hold the complexity.”

In ‘Nocturne’, Crowe’s immersion in the Australian bush and her experiences beside large bodies of water inform landscapes that hover between the observed and the remembered. These paintings invite viewers to recognise the feeling of a place while allowing their own memories to complete it. “What emerges is a sense of nostalgia and transition, which are subject to the memories of each viewer,” says Crowe.

In Still Here, Georgia Pricone returns to the still-life genre with the technical assurance and close observation that characterised her 2023 debut, Botanica Vita. The seven paintings are the result of sustained periods of looking in her Melbourne studio, where Pricone works with an almost scholarly concentration on the particularities of her subjects. 

Their apparent simplicity is hard-won. Flowers and glass vessels are arranged, reconsidered and subtly repositioned; the fall of light is adjusted until each element assumes its precise place. Very little intervenes between the object and the eye. Against expanses of white, the density of a petal, the transparency of glass, the weight of fabric and the peculiar translucency of a leaf become events in themselves.

Margaret Preston provides an important precedent for this way of looking. Writing of Australian wildflowers, she observed that they were “quite on their own”, their colour possessing a softness and brilliance particular to the Australian atmosphere. She also described still life as a “laboratory table on which aesthetic problems can be isolated”: a place where form, colour and composition might be examined with unusual intensity. 

Pricone’s flowers invite precisely this kind of scrutiny. Her waratahs and orchids retain the asymmetry and irregularity of the living plant: stems establish unexpected diagonals, leaves project beyond the measured confines of their vessels, and flowers resist the symmetry imposed upon them. Against this, the glassware brings a different order. Some vessels have the clean, streamlined geometry associated with Art Deco; others are rounded and baluster-shaped, their scrolling surfaces more ornate and almost baroque.  In each painting, the vessel establishes a formal discipline against which the flowers can retain their unruliness.

The white drapery complicates this arrangement further. Soft in substance but emphatic in form, it gathers into folds that are almost architectural, at times suggesting marble or plaster. It brings to mind the sculptural language of classical antiquity, and in particular the strange authority of the fragment: the marble figure whose missing limb or torso has separated it from its original whole, yet whose incompleteness has become inseparable from its beauty. 

Something of this condition is present in Pricone’s flowers. Cut from their living source and held upright by glass and water, they are fully present and already passing from it. Their shadows sharpen the paradox. Cast across the drapery, they become temporary counterparts to the flowers themselves, visible only for as long as the light permits. The still life, in Pricone’s hands, is a means of holding a fleeting arrangement in suspension: flower and vessel, cloth and shadow, all briefly fixed before the inevitable change.

In the two years since Dharawal-based painter and Anaiwan woman Miranda Hampson appeared in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, her practice has gained remarkable momentum. In 2026 alone, she was selected as a finalist for the Hadley’s Art Prize, Mosman Art Prize, Goulburn Art Award and Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, receiving the inaugural Installers’ Choice Award at Mosman.

Hampson’s paintings combine considerable technical accomplishment with a sustained interest in material, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. Esoteric Lore, following her 2025 exhibition Vantage, extends this enquiry through an increasingly delicate and exacting language of paint. Across some of the largest canvases of her career, minute marks accumulate into filaments, ripples and dense fields, giving the surfaces a quality that is at once woven, organic and impossibly weightless.

The fishing net provides the collection’s central image. In certain works, it is recognisable as an object, suspended against a neutral ground or caught in shadow. Elsewhere, it spreads across the canvas, becoming almost abstract and, in places, suggestive of cracked earth. For Hampson, the net offers a compelling way of considering Country as a system of interconnected relationships. “Fish traps do not resist movement entirely; they work with currents, migration and seasonal change,” she says.

There is something apt, too, in the way the net is made. Each line depends upon the next, as thread depends upon thread. Hampson recreates this structure entirely in paint, and beneath that lies the linen canvas itself, already woven. There are, in other words, several kinds of making held within a single surface: the weave of the canvas, the weave of the net, and the ‘stitching’ of paint.

This same kind of thinking is extended, with similar rigour, across other phenomena and subject matter, all suggestive, in some way, of a balanced coexistence with Country, or a call to repair these missing links.

The long strands of kelp in The Shape We Take bend with currents and tides, dancing in response to the water around them, bringing a distinctly more fluid kind of reciprocity to the fore. “The organisms that sustain the world are often the least visible,” says Hampson. “Like phytoplankton and kelp, they remind us that life persists through countless acts of exchange and connection beyond our immediate view.”

In Ballarat-based artist Joanne Sisson’s paintings, delicate stems arc, loop and wander across the canvas, their restless movement held — though never contained — within crystal, vintage glass and humble vessels. The flowers appear perpetually on the verge of outgrowing their arrangements, caught somewhere between cultivation and wildness.

Sisson’s compositions occupy two interconnected worlds: the airy realm above the vessel, where stems reach outward and upward, and the submerged world below, where those same forms twist and coil through transparent glass. It is a space of doubling and reflection, where what is seen and what is hidden exist in conversation.

Working within the compressed pictorial space of the modernist still-life tradition, Sisson dispenses with deep perspective, locating her subjects within only the faintest suggestion of a tabletop, often established by little more than a subtle shift in tone against an otherwise uninterrupted field of colour. The celebrated, comparatively small series of still-life paintings John Brack completed in the 1950s comes to mind: their crisp edges, restrained backgrounds, and the precise visual tension between organic irregularity and geometric order.

The directness and graphic clarity with which Brack depicted his subjects reflected both a stylistic moment and a particular social climate — a postwar preference for restraint, efficiency and economy over ornament. Sisson carries this inheritance into a contemporary practice, expanding the isolated botanical form into a more abundant language of colour and movement.

Across Unfurl, Sisson’s flowers acquire an unexpected presence. A stem of sedum bends gently beneath the weight of its bloom, its curve recalling the poised movement of a ballet dancer. Such moments lend the paintings a distinct theatricality, as though each arrangement possesses its own temperament: a cast of characters suspended in a scene.