This September, Michael Reid Southern Highlands presents a commanding showcase of leading female painters from the Iwantja Arts Community – the Indigenous-owned and -governed art centre in the rocky desert country of Indulkana, on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands of South Australia.

“Painting … is a teaching tool,” says Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan, director and cultural liaison officer of Iwantja Arts, and a featured artist in ‘Ngura pilunpa – Peaceful Country’. “We use our paintings as a way of sharing stories, Country and Tjukurpa (ancestral creation stories), as well as what it was like here in the old days — like the mission times when people were living and working at the stations.”

Established nearly fifty years ago as a modest communal printmaking facility, Iwantja Arts has, through the vision of its founding directors, evolved into one of the most dynamic and respected centres of contemporary art in Australia, with an influence reaching far beyond its desert home.

Ngura pilunpa- Peaceful Country brings together works by Vicki Yatjiki Cullinan, Emily Cullinan, Raylene Walatinna, Betty King, Priscilla Singer, Maringka Burton, Trisha Singer, Sallyanne Robert, Rosalind Tjanyari and Daisy Barney.

Each artist, with her distinct visual language, paints a single Tjukurpa – a cultural story rooted in her Country. Barney captures the lush vibrancy of the Kapata (bush plum) plant; Cullinan evokes the waterholes, boulders and riverbeds once traversed with her family on long journeys across Country. Burton, painting her ancestral lands of Anamara Piti – the site of the Caterpillar Tjukurpa, near Irrunytju (Wingellina) – uses sweeping brushwork to map roads and waterholes in bold, fluid lines.

Vicki Potter is a Sydney-based artist, currently undertaking her Master of Fine Art at the National Art School. The artist’s work begins in the landscape but resists straightforward representation. Impressions of movement, light and distance are filtered through an intuitive process. There are no fixed subjects here; the interest lies in how the image is constructed and what it might hold.

“Walking is central to my practice,” Potter says. “It is how I gather sensory impressions and bear witness to the ephemeral: the shifting path of a flock of birds, the imprint of a well-travelled footpath, or the brief impression of waves on sand.” These details are not rendered directly, but absorbed into the surface. “Sometimes it’s a more enduring trace,” she continues, “like a fossil embedded in rock. It’s these sorts of images that find their slippery way into my paintings.” 

Following the luminous success of Due North, Bellingen-based contemporary painter Melanie Waugh returns with Harbour Held, a radiant new body of work that anchors her expressive brushwork and coastal sensibility to Sydney’s iconic harbour landscapes. These new paintings, completed during the cooler months, return to the cherished inlets and headlands of Eora/Sydney—from Cremorne Point to Shelley Beach and Cottage Point—where sandstone pathways wind through coastal scrub and brilliant green fronds burst from the foreground. “Sydney Harbour is a favourite subject of mine which is probably confusing to a lot of people because I don’t live there anymore,” Waugh says. “I return to it over and over again and yet the subjects seem endless.”

Cameilia Grace Edwards is an emerging Australian artist working in oil on canvas. Based in a small NSW regional town, she paints from a shared studio space in town with a large street-facing window, offering the community a glimpse into her process and a quiet connection to her evolving work. Over the past four and a half years, she has been transitioning from commission-based work to developing her own personal style, rooted in light, memory, and stillness. Cameilia has been selected as a finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize and the 2023 Lethbridge Small Scale Art Prize, and has twice received acquisition prizes in the Inverell Art Prize (2020 and 2023).

“This collection explores the quiet intimacy between light and landscape — the fleeting, golden moments that often go unnoticed, yet carry a deep emotional charge. Working in oils, I aim to translate memory, atmosphere, and stillness into layered compositions that feel both personal and universal.  While rooted in realism, some of my paintings drift into a softened, almost dreamlike realm — a visual echo of how we remember beauty, not how we first saw it.  I work from a shared creative space in our small town, where my easel sits by the front window. As I paint, passersby often stop to watch, wave, or step inside for a conversation. This visibility has become an unexpected and treasured part of my practice — transforming what can be a solitary process into something quietly communal. That connection with people, place, and pace grounds my work in a lived, local rhythm.  At the core of my work is a desire to hold space for calm. In a fast-moving world, painting offers me — and hopefully the viewer — a pause, a breath, and a sense of still wonder.” ~ Cameilia Grace Edwards 2025

Following her celebrated Through an Artist’s Journal collection last year, Archibald and Wynne Prize finalist Julianne Ross Allcorn returns with Interwoven, a body of work that delves deeper into her lyrical connection with the Australian bush. Much like an orchestra, the bush comes alive in her paintings. Each work captures part of its score, an interplay of colour, texture, and light.

Ross Allcorn’s creative process is rooted in the countless hours she spends sketching and writing in the field, carrying her notebook to record the rhythms of nature. She draws inspiration from the flora and fauna of the Burralong Valley and Lower Hunter, as well as her Garden Studio in Roseville, where the bushland surroundings continue to inform her work.

Artist quotes with asterix and all studio imagery courtesy of Southern Wild Co and Jessica Bellef

Following its celebrated debut at our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery, Uncertain Truths by Scott Perkins is now showing at Michael Reid Southern Highlands in a special presentation timed to coincide with the announcement of his representation by Michael Reid Galleries.

Ushering in a striking development in the artist’s visual vocabulary, two new works – densely layered forest scenes rendered in stark, atmospheric monochrome – have been created exclusively for the Berrima iteration of Uncertain Truths, extending the contemplative seascapes of the original series into a deeper, terrestrial register: more intricate, more elusive, and equally arresting.

Perkins’s landscapes defy easy geography. Tasmania, the Kimberley, coastal Italy and New Zealand are invoked but never concretely mapped. Instead, they are pared back to their essences — distilled through fine lines, tonal washes and silvery gradients. What at first seems minimal — austere, even — gradually reveals itself as a web of quiet intricacies. Cloud banks shimmer with granular light; horizons dissolve into ambiguity; mirrored waters and shadowed terrains teeter on the edge of the surreal.

The series includes works displayed within bespoke, portal-like light boxes — illuminated structures that dissolve the boundaries between photograph, sculpture and architecture. Meticulously crafted from movement-resistant timber, these frames become containers of extraordinary stillness, drawing the viewer into an immersive, almost meditative encounter with the image.

To discuss works from the series, please email southernhighlands@michaelreid.com.au

Thick with texture and charged with feeling, Impasto brings together the works of Zaide Harker and Bernie Greaves, two contemporary painters who wield oil paint with a bold, sculptural intensity. In this dual presentation, gesture becomes language and surface becomes story, as each artist pushes the medium to its expressive limits.

For both Harker and Greaves, impasto is more than a technique. It is a way of seeing, processing and communicating. Paint is not smoothed or restrained; it is piled, sculpted and pushed to the very edges of the canvas, commanding attention and offering a distinctly physical experience of looking.

Zaide Harker, a 2024 National Emerging Art Prize finalist, delivers works that pulse with urgency and lived experience. Their heavily worked canvases speak to themes of identity, imperfection and transformation, shaped in part by the artist’s own diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease and a long history within the disability support community. Here, oil paint becomes something more than pigment and binder. It is movement, resistance, memory. Harker’s impassioned mark-making transforms limitation into power, and fragility into force.

Bernie Greaves, currently based in London, approaches the canvas with a designer’s eye and a painter’s instinct. Drawing from Sydney’s urban and coastal fringe, Greaves’ compositions capture the often-overlooked lyricism of suburbia: terrace houses, telegraph poles, the unmistakable silhouette of a palm tree. His background in architecture is present not in rigid precision but in the bones of the compositions. The joy lies in how he builds upon these forms with lush, layered applications of colour. Each painting is a portal into a world where detail and delight coexist.

Together, these artists celebrate the emotional and material weight of paint itself. Impasto is an exhibition of surface and depth, control and chaos. It is a testament to the enduring power of gesture in contemporary painting.

Over the course of two decades, Jessie Breakwell has refined a visual language rooted in her admiration for Brett Whiteley and Henri Matisse. But the distinctiveness of her work lies in its synthesis of personal history and far-flung influence—most notably her father’s years in Uruguay and her own travels across South America. The vibrancy of the region, its colours and cultural traditions, weaves through her compositions, infusing them with a grounded warmth that offsets their bold formalism.

The foundation for Breakwell’s artistic sensibility was laid early. Her childhood home was a world of intricate surfaces—her mother’s jewellery and fabric designs featured pelts, beaded textiles, and richly layered materials. These tactile beginnings shaped her understanding of texture and form, elements that remain central to her practice today.

In The Fabric of Faces, this legacy manifests in portraits that reward a slow and deliberate engagement, drawing viewers closer with their layered simplicity. Faces become vessels for presence, emotion, and ambiguity—less about likeness than a kind of psychic imprint. Breakwell’s stylised figures, often flattened and monumental, resist narrative and flirt with the ceremonial. Eyes are wide, often hollowed of light, inviting scrutiny while withholding clarity. Her compositions evoke both folk traditions and ancient forms, distilling something timeless and elemental. These are works that hum with quiet intensity, portraits that stare back—imbued with the quiet drama of being seen.

The luminous canvases of Shimmering Country, the forthcoming major showcase from the Artists of Ampilatwatja, extend a vibrant legacy of storytelling and kinship. Building on the critical success of Edie and Her Daughters, this new body of work features Joyrene Ngwarraye Holmes, Edie Kemarre Holmes, Kindy Kemarre Ross, and Jessie Ngwarraye Ross. It delves again into the intricate ties between cultural heritage, personal memory, and the resplendent landscapes of Central Australia.

The Artists of Ampilatwatja are renowned for their vivid depictions of flowering plants, expansive blue skies, and verdant plains. Their canvases, alive with intricate dot patterns and radiant colour, offer an overhead perspective of their landscape, a distinctive feature of their work. This aerial view not only maps the physical characteristics of their environment but also charts the cultural and botanical knowledge embedded within it. Plants such as kwenkart (turkey bush), therrpeyt (native fuchsia), and ntang (edible seeds), used for Arreth (strong bush medicine), are woven into the fabric of these paintings, reflecting their millennia-old importance as healing resources.