Shaped by Weather

Shaped by Weather is Anita Phillips’ debut collection with Michael Reid Southern Highlands, bringing together landscapes from the iron-red expanses of the Pilbara and the rolling, hills of Tasmania. Across these markedly different places, Phillips adjusts her palette and descriptive language. The collection records a shift in perspective: a gradual tilting of the landscape towards the viewer, from the distant horizons of WA to the broad, inscribed foregrounds of Tasmania.

In the Pilbara paintings, the landscape is mostly compressed into a thin rust-red band, sometimes occupying little more than a fraction of the canvas. Trees are lightly defined by dashes and dabs of paint, slight apostrophes against a pale horizon, while enormous expanses of sky open above them. In works like Here, The Blue and Shaped by Weather, the effect is panoramic: the horizon runs in a nearly unbroken lateral line through the painting and seems to continue beyond its edges

It is here that Fred Williams comes to mind, particularly his remarkable ability to find monumentality in the Australian landscape through a spare vocabulary of marks and dashes. Phillips shares something of this economy. Yet in these works, reduction is also a matter of perspective. By lowering the horizon and withholding the foreground, she places the landscape at a distance. We look out across it rather than into it; the enormity of the place is registered in the disproportion between that slender strip of earth and the atmosphere above. 

In the Tasmanian paintings, that relationship is overturned. Sky relinquishes much of the canvas to fields, grasses and sloping terrain. In ‘Drifting Blue’, a long, slender horizontal view near Richmond sets the ordered expanse of agricultural land against the hills beyond: terrain that, despite the geometry imposed upon it, remains beyond the farmers’ control. It is this tension between cultivation and wildness that gives the Tasmanian paintings their particular charge. And above it all, the weather, continually altering the character of the land beneath it.

In ‘If You Wait Long Enough’ and ‘As It Should Be’, the foreground extends almost to meet us. Broad expanses of ochre and muted gold push from the lower edge of the painting towards hills softened by rain and mist.

Across these foregrounds, paint is accumulated, scraped back and scored into. Among these marks appear fragments of written language, drawn from the journals Phillips keeps as she travels and works: observations, recollections and partial phrases inscribed into the painted surface. Some can be read; others disappear into the surrounding marks.

Phillips has exhibited widely across Western Australia and interstate, and has undertaken painting residencies and field research in Tasmania, Central Australia, the Pilbara, Scotland and Cornwall. In 2025 she was awarded the Cossack Art Prize Overall Winner and was a finalist in the Ravenswood Art Prize, Sydney.