A Place of Belonging 

The rugged countryside of Tasmania’s north-west coast finds eloquent expression in Brooke Van Ruiswyk’s A Place of Belonging, her debut exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

It is a landscape of rolling hills, sodden paddocks and heavy skies, dotted with wind-pruned macrocarpa and traced by shelter belts. This is the country in which Van Ruiswyk, and generations of her family before her, have lived and worked.

Drawing upon photographs and field observations, Van Ruiswyk returns to the studio and reconstructs her scenes with oils. There is a natural affinity between the medium and the world it describes: the dewiness of oil paint echoes the moisture-laden atmosphere of the landscape itself. Thick passages of paint lend weight and solidity to the hills, while more delicate applications capture the drifting mists and lingering fog.

Across the exhibition, the eye is repeatedly drawn upward to immense sheets of cloud. At times they are feathery; at others they loom low over the countryside, carrying the promise of rain. Van Ruiswyk grants equal weight to the physical grandeur of the terrain and these vast, granite-grey, skies. They are, in her words, “a central emotional presence” in the work.

In 2024, Van Ruiswyk received the People’s Choice Award in the Henry Jones Art Prize. Her work has also been recognised through three selections in the Glover Prize – one of Australia’s most prestigious awards for landscape painting – as well as finalist honours in the Lethbridge 20,000 Award in both 2022 and 2023.