A 2024 finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize, Zaide Harker’s paintings pulse with urgency, shaped by lived experience and expressed through an unguarded, physical engagement with paint. 

A diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease and a lifelong engagement with the disability support community deeply inform Harker’s practice. Their paintings are shaped by both the embodied experience of neurodegeneration and the personal history of caring for affected family members. This layered perspective rejects fear-based narratives around disability and instead affirms complexity, power, and grace.

The works presented here centre on loosely held still-life arrangements: flowering stems, clustered blooms, and weighty vessels that appear to buckle slightly under the pressure of their own making. Sunflower heads, protea-like forms, and curling pink and white blooms are constructed from dense slabs of oil, their surfaces ridged and striated with gesture. Colour is laid on generously — yellows, greens, creams, and bruised pinks folding into one another — creating fleshy, tactile surfaces that hold the record of the artist’s hand. 

Studio Imagery: Liv Bridge

Across the Top, Mezzanine and Ground Floors, Michael Reid Southern Highlands showcases a diverse program of Australian art, reflecting a breadth of practice, medium and perspective.

The works presented here — by India Mark, Evan Shipard, Vicki Potter, Diane Kemarre Ross, Beverley Pula Luck, Stacey Mrmacovski, Julianne Ross Allcorn and Peta West — comprise a tightly curated grouping, selected to highlight the range and depth of the gallery’s current program.

From the earliest days of our exhibition program, the Artists of Ampilatwatja have held a vital place at Michael Reid Southern Highlands. Working from their community on Alyawarr Country, approximately 320 kilometres north-east of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), these artists produce intricately layered paintings grounded in deep knowledge of land, culture and continuity. Their works map waterholes, bush medicines, desert flora and ancestral pathways through luminous fields of colour, and are held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the Holmes à Court Collection.

The work of Ampilatwatja artists gives form to cultural knowledge passed down across generations. The paintings articulate specific places and stories, embedded in lived experience and cultural responsibility. While some knowledge remains protected, what is shared speaks clearly of connection, care and continuity. Today, Ampilatwatja painting is recognised as a significant and enduring contribution to contemporary Aboriginal art, sustained by artists ranging from young practitioners to senior Elders, and grounded in a deep relationship to Country.

Apmer – home is land and land is home features the work of Rita Pitjara Beasley, Nancy Pitjara Frank, Beverly Pula Luck, Diane Kemarre Ross, Selina Pula Teece.

For his Michael Reid debut, Evan Shiphard has turned his attention to the bucolic Southern Highlands — to the Wingecarribee River at first light, to mist-laden paddocks, to stands of trees rising through morning fog.

Shipard’s practice sits in clear dialogue with the lineage of Australian Impressionism, particularly the work of Arthur Streeton and his circle. Like Streeton, Tom Roberts and Louis Abrahams (to name but a few), Shipard works through sustained engagement with place, returning repeatedly to the same sites to observe the shifting effects of light, season and atmosphere. Coming from a background in the film industry — where defining the establishing shot was often his role — the landscape presents a natural progression. The impulse is cinematic, but the resolution is painterly.

The familiar shimmering palette of the Australian landscape recurs throughout these works, as does an emphasis on space and distance: rivers winding, trees acting as vertical anchors, and the land opening gradually into air and light. Shipard’s brushwork is active and responsive — at times stippled and broken, at others broader and more assured — while skies are animated through layered, mannered passages of cloud and morning fog. These qualities recall Streeton’s own delight in the physical act of painting outdoors.

“The Highlands never ceases to inspire- the seasons change with such splendour and there is always an evocative quality to the place especially in the early morning light or the fading of golden hour into dusk. It whispers timeless melodies from the winding Wingeecaribee to the remote trails, waterfalls and wetlands.”

Gunning, NSW is a place of enduring personal significance for Emily Gordon. She has travelled here with her family for many years, returning again and again to this gorgeous landscape.  Across this small suite of works, Gordon charts the paddocks, tree lines, winding roads and bodies of water around Gunning with the same acuity she brings to urban facades. Eucalypts rise pale and rhythmic against broad skies; roads curve gently through dry grasslands; reflections double the world in still pools.

What links Quieter Ground to Gordon’s cityscapes is her enduring commitment to Australian light as a structuring force.  In Paddington and The Rocks, light falls across architectural planes—staircases, rooftops, terraces stepping downhill. Here, light behaves differently. It is ecological and spatial: moving laterally through sky, repeating across tree trunks. Ochres, golds and muted greens replace the gelato tones of the city, yet Gordon’s palette remains alert and finely calibrated.

A sustained intimacy with the landscape is felt throughout Quieter Ground. Scale plays an important role. Working on an intimate register allows Gordon to distil each composition to its essentials. If Paddington Stories emerged from sustained urban wandering, Quieter Ground feels anchored in stillness and return: a body of work attentive to the slower disclosures of a place known over time.  Quieter Ground ultimately affirms Emily Gordon as a painter of place in the fullest sense—equally attuned to the city’s charged complexity and to the restrained, durational poetry of the regional landscape.

Julia Flanagan’s debut exhibition with Michael Reid unfolds in vivid, jubilant cadences of colour, pattern and form, and reveals an artist working at full stretch within a language she has made her own. The paintings seem animated by the same rhythm: lines curve, return and cross themselves, slipping between foreground and background as though intent on binding the works together. Many begin as drawings – quick, provisional notations made at a domestic table or studio bench – before widening into fields of paint. From there, fragments are enlarged, spliced, rephrased; a sliver from an earlier canvas becomes the seed of the next. Quilting squares, remembered from her mother’s sewing, offer geometric ballast, though that order is soon unsettled by curves and arcs that dip and weave like the thread pulled through cloth. The result is a choreography of parts – disciplined, but never still.

It is our great pleasure to welcome Dharawal multi-disciplinary artist Amy Cuneo to our top floor gallery this coming January. Cuneo’s subjects link us to essential and reassuring elements in our lives including familiar objects, flowers and tender depictions of domestic scenes.

For her collection Spread  Cuneo says “These paintings have taken their form while considering how we spread our attention, affection and energy in everyday life. Domestic demands as a caregiver continue but within these parameters I have scope to play, imagine and enjoy. These works are an invitation to attend the lives we have in front of us- colour filled and complex.”  

Cuneo has shown widely in NSW and Tasmania and has been a finalist in several art prizes including FLOW (2019/2023) and the Fisher’s Ghost (2023). Her work is included in various private collections throughout Australia, New Zealand and Sweden and has been collected by Tiers & Co Collecting Group

Out of the Blue is a mini-suite of oil paintings emerging from a practice concerned, in essence, with the condition of being human. These works – forming Armelle Swan’s debut with the gallery – aim to characterise, in poetic and intuitive terms, some of the most charged human experiences — grief among them.

Across the suite, notions of presence and absence recur. In still life the figure is typically absent, yet it may reappear by proxy: a cup, jug or bottle operating as a kind of cipher for the human in the story.

Each work here centres on a vessel — cups, a vase, a jug, a bowl — a motif that since antiquity has carried metaphorical weight, touching on ideas of literal and figurative containment and the human impulse to keep or hold.

Two works, ‘Not in the Picture’ and ‘Revealed’, feature vessels decorated in blue and white motifs traditionally associated with funerals, death and mourning in Chinese culture. This symbolism sits in neat alignment with still life’s historical relationship to mortality, and with the larger theme of grief within the suite. These elements became newly compelling in Swan’s practice following two life-altering experiences: the recent arrival of a daughter-in-law of Chinese ancestry, and, some years earlier, the death of her own daughter — a loss that precipitated a long and brutal journey of grief. In these paintings, the cultural and the deeply personal converge.

‘Kitchen Sill (after Hopper)’ may appear, at first glance, to depict a simple domestic interior, yet its composition carries a more philosophical charge. The velvety darkness outside, the bright white sill, and the pendant lights reflected in the glass recall the haunting sensibility of Edward Hopper’s Automat. The window becomes a threshold: a meeting point of dark and light. The reflected lights appear to move from the interior into the night, piercing both the window pane and the picture plane as they recede like a row of distant streetlamps. As ever, the window is an ‘eye’ that sees, and the view it frames echoes the act of painting itself.

‘Glow’ offers an interior heightened by a keen register of attention — a meditation on observation and presence.

Armelle Swan has exhibited in group and solo shows, completed numerous portrait commissions, and been a finalist in several awards, including the Waverley 9 x 5” (twice), the Kings School Art Prize, the Harden Landscape Prize, and various portraiture and still life prizes. Highlights include curated exhibitions such as ACB Selects (2023), The Making Effect for the Arts Health Association NSW (2020), and Dot, dot, dot… (2017) at Sydney College of the Arts Galleries.

In 2019 she undertook a study tour of Italy with Dr Julie Fragar, and in 2023 completed a major arts–health commission for SPHERE Knowledge Translation, creating works based on her interpretation of academic health-study findings. Her works are represented in private collections in Australia, South Africa, the UK, Dubai and Singapore, and in public collections including the Young Endeavour Youth Scheme, the Archdiocese of Hobart and the Black Dog Institute.

Opening this December, Botanica Vita II assembles nine artists who return, again and again, to the natural world — to the flowers, branches and unruly greens that anchor their sense of place. For each, the botanical is less a subject than a lens: a way of noticing, of keeping time, of understanding how the living world impresses itself on the mind.

Several familiar voices reappear here — India Mark, Louise Anders, Angie de Latour, Susan Morris, Miranda Summers, Nadja Kabriel and Baden Croft — their works forming a kind of ongoing conversation across years and exhibitions. They are joined, for the first time, by Allie Webb and Alice Laura Palmer, whose paintings bring a fresh tempo to the still-life tradition, alert to subtle shifts in colour, light and structure.

Across the collection, the works share an understanding that the botanical is never static. Light shifts, colour gathers and recedes, compositions tighten and loosen. A single stem can hold a surprising amount of intent; a vase can become an anchor point for an entire scene.

Botanica Vita II asks viewers to consider why these forms endure — why flowers, branches and arranged objects continue to offer artists a way into deeper observation.