It is our enormous pleasure to welcome Melbourne-based still life painter Susan Morris to our Project Space at Michael Reid Southern Highlands this month, with her collection of new work titled A Walk in the Park.

On walks with her dog Milou in her home-town of Melbourne, also known as ‘the city of gardens’, Susan’s painter’s eye observes and picks out plants in her local environment to be captured in oils back in her studio.  The ever ubiquitous dried gum leaves depicted in the painting Fall, is a celebration of one of nature’s gifts at the end of its life cycle.  A small branch that would usually be trodden on or swept aside, it’s beauty now brought back to life through gentle and fine brush strokes.  The inky dark background highlighting its fragility and uniqueness as it dances and falls in the light.

“Still life is often autobiographical in nature, as are my paintings. They reflect where I’ve been and where I live. The containers also have a story to tell, whether it is in the immediacy of a glass jar,  an heirloom vase from a country far away or a clay vessel from a local potter. Holding our precious and unique indigenous flora, that relationship speaks of home, history and country.” says Susan.

Susan has been a finalist in numerous awards including the Waterhouse Natural Science and Art Prize, the Mosman Art prize, the Lethbridge 20000, the Waverley Art Prize, Omnia Art Prize, the Linden Postcard Prize and the York Botanic Prize as well as a solo exhibition at the Victorian Artists Society in 2021.

For Sydney-based painter Mary Stack, the domestic realm becomes a space for formal experimentation and quiet reflection. In Unfolded Linen on Linen II, she continues her investigation into the visual potential of the everyday—handkerchiefs, tea towels, the folds and creases of cloth. “Everyday items like handkerchiefs and tea towels felt like a familiar starting point,” she says. “By isolating these objects from their usual surroundings, my aim is to keep the interpretation open.” Though the subject matter may appear humble, Stack’s intellectual foundations are deeply rooted in art history.

A joint recipient of the 2023 Brandon Trakman Prize for Art History and Theory, she sees her practice as part of a broader, ongoing conversation. “While artists strive for original work, we cannot ignore that everything we make is part of a larger conversation.” Her influences are broad, ranging from the rigorous abstraction of Albers and Agnes Martin to the hushed, luminous order of Vermeer and de Hooch. “There’s something about the way they used light and shadow—it’s not just about realism. It’s about presence, and creating space for reflection.”

The Maningrida Arts Community in north-west Arnhem Land produces a rich variety of fibre objects, both utilitarian and artistic. These include mats, baskets, bags, wall hangings, ceremonial regalia, and sculptural fish traps.

The primary thread for these weavings is the pandanus leaf, which is dyed using natural materials like the bloodroot. The weaving process is laborious, but the women who practice it take pride in their craft and its transmission to younger generations.

Each weaver’s unique style is reflected in her work. The colours of the weavings—reds, yellows, browns, black, and green—echo the changing seasons and the availability of different dye-yielding plants.

Maningrida Arts and Culture, the coordinating art centre for the Mun-dirra project at the NGV Triennial, is a leading Indigenous arts centre representing renowned artists like John Mawurndjul. Notably, the Mun-dirra project resulted in the creation of Australia’s largest woven sculpture.

Images on Country: Richard Mockler for ‘Making Mun-dirra’ – with Anna Freeland, ABC Arts, February 12 2024

Information Sourced: Elizabeth Fortescue, ‘Vast fish fence takes centre stage at Melbourne’s NGV Triennial’, The Art Newspaper, December 4 2023

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.

In the six oil pastel works that make up ‘So Long, Summer’, Sydney/Cammeraygal artist Phoebe Stone bids farewell to this enchanting season by depicting a late lunch at the dining table. Envision warm golden light, shareable dishes, clusters of flowers in vintage earthenware, and linen tablecloths draping over weathered wooden tops.

Using her distinctive linear dashes and curlicue lines, Stone leverages the immediacy and vigour of the oil stick. The joy and energy of being among friends finds its equivalent in this medium. 

But if the works in ‘So Long, Summer’ have the air of being completed in a single, unbridled burst of creative energy – it is only because the artist has so skilfully disguised the careful analysis and control behind them. She describes “the beauty and delight to be found in a well balanced coming together of composition, colour, pattern and texture” something which takes time and calibrated focus. 

Unveiled in our top floor gallery, six oil on linen landscapes comprise ‘Watching Dawn Break and Dusk Fall’ – a collection of exquisitely painted landscapes from Port Stephens-based Linda Greedy

Areas of spareness in these views of Three Capes Track and Low Head, Tasmania give way to surging cacophonies of lines – denoting dense scrub – and revealing Linda’s formidable talent as a draughts-person. Here, the artist precisely evokes the emotional charge and monumentality of standing and walking within these landscapes. One senses the wind buffeting one’s face, hears the sigh of branches and smells the surge of the sea below. Linda has the rare talent of carrying the spectator directly into the picture.

‘Rocky Outcrop’ depicts a central tree curving sideways by the whipping coastal winds – and now only half supported by the ground on which it stands. The finesse and small workings of her brush gives this most ancient of subject matters a certain glory and presence. The exhilarating Tasmanian landscape is presented in lyrical detail.

For the artist, bushwalking “gifts (her) the opportunity to take time to immerse and appreciate the sights, sounds, and unpredictable weather of the natural environment.”.

In 2021, Madison Baird entered the National Emerging Art Prize with her painting ‘When the bees are busy’. The judging panel were wowed by Baird’s accomplished depiction of nasturtiums curling out of a large glass vase, acknowledging her with a finalist placement. Prize co-founder, Amber Creswell Bell has been watching her practice develop since. For her debut showing at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Baird has created a series of new works titled ‘Midnight Garden’.

The collection of flora – geraniums, nasturtiums and angel’s trumpets – painted in their garden settings after dark, captures the soothing solitude found in these inky nighttime environments. The calming rhythms and unhurried pace of nature invite a gentle stillness.Working on Gadigal land, Sydney, Baird “explores land as a space of emotional reprieve, of refuge, and of a soft return to a greater whole. Although without external gaze, the bush holds a mirror up to our internal states. It is a poignant reminder that, like nature, we are always in a state of becoming, akin to the flowers that bud and wither.”

A Celebration of the Still brings together six Australian luminaries of contemporary still-life painting in a vibrant and varied paean to the genre’s enduring vitality and its power to instil even the simplest inanimate objects with life, storytelling, small moments of grace and meditations on the human experience.

Launching an exciting program of group exhibitions featuring some of Australia’s most important and celebrated contemporary artists, this beautifully curated collection presents exquisite, original works by India Mark, John Honeywill, Kaspar Kägi, Mirra Whale, David Bongiorno and David Griffith.

With their distinct styles, perspectives, and painterly approaches, these artists each engage with the ideas and themes that have captivated still-life painters for centuries while awakening the genre to fresh and dynamic possibilities. Their work represents a pure expression of that elusive magic sparked somewhere between the eye and the hand of the artist, where meticulous observation of an object’s form, colour and interaction with light is channelled through the creative mind and expressed with extraordinary skill and precision.

The elegant collection of florals, object studies and tablescapes that make up A Celebration of the Still reflects many of the classic tenets of still-life painting. Here, a profusion of delicately unfolding flowers and ripened fruit maps nature’s cycles of life and death onto the quieter, quotidian contours of the domestic sphere. But for all its storied lineage, still life’s attention to our ever-evolving material world lends the genre an inherent contemporaneity. The visionary artists assembled for our still-life showcase seem less weighed down by notions of mortality than in thrall to the joys of living, observing and creating.

For Mirra Whale, the elegiac quality of wilting magnolias – that most prehistoric of floral specimens, whose soft, crêpe-like petals melt from gnarled and craggy branches – is balanced by a fabulous sense of play as her fading subjects are given a second life by the dancing shadows cast by her studio’s cool light. John Honeywill’s paintings eschew narrative altogether, focusing instead on an object’s innate luminosity, spatial dynamics and the interplay between its physical presence and the artist’s perception. Kaspar Kägi’s flowers and fruit come flickering into view through a soft, pointillistic haze, drawing attention to his medium’s mechanics and materiality as fine, aggregated strokes coalesce on a flat pictorial plane and imbue the ephemeral with an elegant gravitas.

Each artist delights in the potential for still life to freeze a fleeting moment of beauty and quietude. Celebrating the alchemy of things artfully arranged, serendipitously set together, or appearing quite inexplicably like tiny theatres amid the din of the every day, they share their affinities and offer snippets of refracted autobiography through the objects they choose to immortalise. A Celebration of the Still invites us to take a closer look at the objects that furnish our domestic lives while delighting in the quiet power and visual poetry of these petite and perfectly formed paintings.

“For the viewer, the artist’s visual language might evoke a jolting memory – an object acting as a portal to another place or time. It might allow a beautiful, quiet moment in which to rest one’s eyes in the midst of an otherwise frenzied life. It might be the unidentifiable atmosphere suggested in its rendering of a subject … still life offers to us a subjective glimpse into our very existence.” – Amber Creswell Bell, Still Life, 2021.

All works from the exhibition are available to view and acquire at the gallery and online. To discuss works from the exhibition, please email southernhighlands@michaelreid.com.au

Naarm/Melbourne-based, Stacey McCall’s latest collection of elegantly composed tablescapes builds on the tremendous creative success of her previous series, Breathwork, which saw her move towards a loose and fluid painterly style while paying tribute to the simple, handmade objects that furnish our everyday lives.

Reflected in the title of her series, Distil beautifully displays the artist’s deft ability to conjure the spirit of her subjects with an economy of graceful gestures and pared-back textural markings that emerge through soft clouds of earthy hues.

“An artist friend told me she thought my work captured the ‘essence’ of something, pared down to the most essential aspect,” says McCall. “I took this description and definitely applied it to this body of work. “I am still very interested in capturing an emotion, noticing an interesting shape, texture or colour, rather than trying to paint in a realistic way.”

Brought to life with delicate washes and areas of soft or scratchy drybrush effects, McCall’s new works convey a sense of the artist drawing closer and closer to the objects of her affection as she quietly sketches out their form and ghostly essence as if through a gossamer haze.

“I usually apply a classical technique – a detailed underpainting with layers of colour – but my intention is to extract the essence of something, the simplicity of form, very much inspired by painters such as Ben Nicholson and Giorgio Morandi.”

The Artists of Ampilatwatja community was established in 1999 near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.
Most of the artists paint Arreth, which translates to ‘strong bush medicine’, demonstrating a deep connection to country. A veritable source of life, the land has provided and sustained Alyawarr people for generations, as every plant and animal has a vital role to play within the ecological system.

The paintings pay homage to the significance and use of traditional bush medicine, allowing an insight into their community. Yet underneath the iridescent surfaces, there is an underlying sense that there is more to these landscapes than meets the eye. In keeping with the religious laws, the artists reveal only a small amount of knowledge to the uninitiated.

The esoteric information that is held sacred to these artists and their people is concealed from the public and layered underneath the common visual narrative, masked by the delicate layered dots of the painting. The many levels of interpretation permit artists to present their art to an often culturally untutored public without compromising its religious nature. Artists talk of two broad levels of interpretation, the “inside” stories which are restricted to those of the appropriate ritual standing, and the “outside” stories which are open to all.