‘Lookaftering’

In Lookaftering, a group exhibition featuring Anthea Stead, Elena Larkin, and Miranda Hampson, the act of care takes on layered meanings. Each artist draws on their intimate connections to place, memory, and culture to explore the creative and ecological imperatives of ‘looking after’. As Annie Dillard once wrote, “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.” This exhibition presents three artists who, through their work, strive to create not only good art but lives imbued with meaning, care, and attention to the natural world.

Anthea Stead’s paintings offer a meditation on the Illawarra Escarpment and its surrounding coastal landscapes. Though rooted in the region’s storms, cliffs, and seas, her works are composites—imagined scenes built from memory, photographs, and imagination. This merging of the familiar and the invented mirrors the ecological balance she observes: the delicate interplay between preservation and vulnerability. Stead’s paintings, with their moments of calm before the storm, evoke the fragility of the world we inhabit, compelling us to care for it as she does.

Elena Larkin’s layered impressions of the Australian bush bring an immersive and dynamic perspective to the theme of care. Working in gouache, she captures the ephemeral rhythms of light and shadow in the forest, painting the sensory experiences of being surrounded by nature. Her dappled, pointillistic markings reflect the vitality of the natural world, shaped by her childhood on Bundjalung Land. Larkin’s works suggest that to look after the land is to embrace its beauty in all its chaos and impermanence, a reminder of our deep, reciprocal relationship with the environments we inhabit.

For Miranda Hampson, an Anaiwan artist, looking after is an act of cultural and personal reclamation. Her work, such as Kati Thanda, honours Indigenous connections to Country, drawing on her heritage and her background in cultural heritage management. Hampson’s paintings are rooted in the shared experiences of kin, Country, and place. Her art extends the idea of care beyond the ecological, suggesting it as a means to heal and strengthen the bonds between people, land, and culture.

Lookaftering offers a poignant reflection on the many ways we care—through art, through attention, and through action. As Dillard suggests, good lives are hard to come by, but in the work of Stead, Larkin, and Hampson, we see a dedication to creating lives of care and connection.