Esoteric Lore

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

Esoteric Lore, following Hampson’s 2025 exhibition Vantage, develops her sustained enquiry into material, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. Across some of the largest canvases of her career, minute marks accumulate into filaments, ripples and dense fields. The paint is worked with a delicacy that belies the scale of the paintings, producing surfaces that appear woven, organic and almost weightless.

The fishing net is the collection’s central motif. In some works, it remains legible as an object, suspended against a neutral ground or caught in shadow. In others, it expands across the canvas, approaching abstraction and, at times, recalling the fissures of parched earth.

The structure of the net finds an echo in the paintings themselves. Each line relies on those around it; no single thread can sustain the whole. Hampson renders this interdependence in paint on linen, a woven surface in its own right. The resulting work holds several forms of making in tension: the weave of the canvas, the construction of the net and the accumulated strokes of paint that bind the image together.

Esoteric Lore will be presented across Michael Reid Southern Highlands and Michael Reid Northern Beaches this October, bringing the two galleries together for a single presentation of Hampson’s work. For priority access, please register your interest.