With Soliloquy, Brisbane-based oil painter Conor Knight makes his return to Michael Reid after nearly two years, presenting a suite of works across our Murrurundi and Southern Highlands spaces throughout June and July.

Knight depicts his floral subjects as boldly illuminated and set against spare grounds, such that the force of our attention rests on the elegance with which these still-life forms are depicted: the curve of a leaf, or the delicacy of a petal.

In this lighting, his subjects are endowed with an almost actorly grace, as though stage-lit and moments away from delivering a great monologue. “In theatre, a soliloquy is a window into the inner thoughts of a character,” says Knight. “These still life paintings use that concept to create works that touch on themes of intimacy, theatricality and solitude. Borrowing their titles from famous monologues and soliloquies, the collection explores feelings that sit between softness and unease.”

Always, there is attention to the gradations of tone changing across his forms as they turn towards and away from their light sources. The control of his brush, allowing it to deposit just enough paint to successfully record a form and then nothing more, gives each work a buoyancy and lightness.

On this level, he recalls one contemporary Australian master, Robert Malherbe. Further back, one can see that the artist is an eager student of history, with a deep respect for the traditions of Dutch and Flemish vanitas painting, albeit in a more gestural register and one less constrained by the pursuit of exact fidelity.

Also coursing through his work is a care for his medium which begins at its earliest stages, mulling his paints himself so that he has the most precise control possible over their viscosity and performance on the canvas. “I’ve really come to appreciate the unique quality of oil as the binding agent in paint,” Knight says. “Oil is able to hold light within. When light hits the surface of an oil painting, some of that light passes through the paint and reflects within the oil.”

In a stylistic flourish, Knight allows elements of the grisaille underpainting to poke through: a nod to the process itself, whereby a stable orange ground becomes the starting point and base colour upon which all others are applied. It is also very much an active element within the final composition, giving the work an almost weathered quality – as though uncovered after centuries.

If his botanical forms can be considered stars of the stage, characters of such devotion singing their arias, then concluding on the cuts of meat must be an undeniable and wry gesture: after the beauty, the meat of the scene, or its substance. Of course, by including the subject, Conor tells us that there is some underappreciated beauty in this subject too.

“My recent body of work is an exploration of scopophilia—an Ancient Greek term translating to the love of looking, or the aesthetic gratification derived from deep observation. While the word often carries psychological or sensual connotations, I find it perfectly captures the quiet, driving obsession at the heart of still life painting.”

Mirra Whale is a Sydney-based artist who has, over a matter of decades, established herself as one of the most beloved and admired still life painters and portraitists working in Australia.

A five-time Archibald finalist, Whale was recently the subject of an expansive survey exhibition at the Ngununggula regional art gallery, Scenes and Silence—a career milestone which, for the first time, saw key examples from the artist’s career positioned in conversation with each other, drawn from private collections across the country.

It was at Ngununggula that the widest arc of Whale’s practice—and her studied devotion to simple scenes, populated by utilitarian vessels and clipped botanicals—became clearer than ever. Hers is an artist’s life devoted to the beauty and staying power of those items and arrangements around us; our pursuit of grace in the domestic interior.

“The subjects of these paintings are intentionally intimate, drawn entirely from the immediate sanctuary of my home and studio. There is no manufactured grandeur here; instead, I find beauty in the overlooked and the familiar. Flowers are gathered from kerbside foraging, fruit rests on my kitchen counter, and cherished objects have travelled alongside me for decades, carrying the invisible weight of memory and time.”

Whale, in life as in art, remains deeply humble, and her practice is a private devotion to form and technique.

When Scenes and Silence was presented alongside an important travelling collection by Clarice Beckett from the National Gallery of Australia, the resonance between these painters was immediately felt. Between them, a serious and disciplined search for beauty—enthral to its force, and the sheer joy of a well-done surface.

“To truly look at an object is an act of pure pleasure,” she says. “The deliberate interplay of light and shadow, the geometry of form, and the texture of a surface are not merely subjects to be recorded; they are the very essence of seeing. Through these paintings, I want to reclaim the act of looking as a form of slow, meditative joy.”

Whale’s studio is a bustling, frenzied space of work and study, tubes and ornamented bowls jostling for space, and a shelf which is, in the Margaret Preston sense, her ‘laboratory’, around which her forms are arranged and tested.

A clear hallmark of a Mirra Whale painting is the tabletop, seen from the slightly elevated or directly side-profile view, atop which tablecloths are left to bunch, crease and drape, ostensibly ‘scoring’ the scene, or setting a kind of soft, geometric grid, almost like the lines of sheet music, and her vessels, the written notes.

It’s this fundamental order and balance that grounds the work, gives it solidity and firmness—and, when actually viewed together, it is as though Mirra is painting on a table that extends for miles; a table that stretches beyond the frame, and has provided the scaffold for her work throughout her career.

Sacred in the Ordinary is, as Mirra writes, “an invitation to slow, to step into my studio, and to share in the profound, instinctual pleasure of simply looking.” It is an invitation we accept in a heartbeat.

Elizabeth Beaumont’s studio is an iron shed nestled amongst the undulating hills of the Southern Highlands, the landscape she calls home. From the outside, it could easily be mistaken for a machinery shed. Within lies a world of restless experimentation: worn books with softened spines; illustrated field guides to Australian native botanicals—including a volume devoted entirely to the acacias of New South Wales in a vivid yellow cover; shelves of pigments; improvised palettes; and canvases that lean against walls or hang overhead in various stages of becoming. At the centre of it all stands Beaumont herself, brush in hand, Blundstones on.

Elizabeth Beaumont was among the first artists to exhibit at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, when the gallery’s program was still in its infancy. Her debut solo exhibition, Everlasting, marked an important turning point in her career. Its immediate success gave her the confidence to commit fully to painting. Since then, she has presented two further solo exhibitions and appeared in several significant group exhibitions, each body of work revealing an artist growing steadily more assured in her language of abstraction.

Each of Beaumont’s paintings is anchored by mark-making at once broad and fluttering, and tonal decisions that celebrate the honey yellows and rich earth spectrum of her local landscape. The painterly arabesques and flecks of pigment suggest a place in flux, rippling with life.

One of the great strengths of abstract painting is its capacity to preserve the movements of its creation. Every gesture, revision and hesitation remains embedded within the finished surface. Rather than pursuing a figurative likeness, abstraction allows an artist to distil experience to its essentials: travelling lines scoring a canvas, layered colour, and the multitude of associations these simple elements can evoke.

For Beaumont, the Australian bush is an enduring source of inspiration. Across these twelve paintings is the unmistakable feeling of moving through it: brushing past flowering shrubs, breathing the scent of eucalyptus, stepping into shafts of light beneath the canopy. Hers is not a landscape observed from afar, but one experienced from within.

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is honoured to present Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku – Keeping Stories Strong, an expansive exhibition bringing together three leading painters from Iwantja Arts, the Indigenous-owned and -governed art centre at Indulkana on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Presenting extraordinary new works by Maringka Burton, Emily Cullinan and Raylene Walatinna, the exhibition celebrates three of the most exciting and accomplished creative voices within the exuberant movement in First Nations painting that has flourished at Iwantja and brought its artists global acclaim.

“Iwantja is an engine room of Australian art – a small desert community producing work of national consequence. Some art centres follow the market; Iwantja drives it,” writes our galleries’ chairman and director, Michael Reid OAM. “Walatinna, Cullinan and Burton paint with the boldness that has made Iwantja one of the most watched and collected art making communities in the country. You don’t need to know anything about collecting First Nations art to feel that. The colour, the wit, the sheer confidence of these paintings speak for themselves.” Now available to preview by request ahead of next week’s opening, Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku arrives at a moment of renewed national attention for Iwantja artists, coinciding with the National Gallery of Australia’s landmark exhibition Ngura Puḻka – Epic Country, where Walatinna and Burton are both represented.

“The energy of an art centre is hard to describe,” writes curator Hannah Presley in the introduction to the widely celebrated 2022 publication IWANTJA, which devotes extensive chapters to each of the three artists featured in Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku. “They buzz with the unexpected activity of an art studio, but there is also another layer to these spaces as sites of cultural continuation. Art making is one of the ways our Elders have shared cultural stories that have informed generations of painters, and art has been a useful tool for reinforcing a strong sense of identity and belonging.” That spirit of cultural continuity is felt throughout Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku, whose title speaks directly to the enduring responsibility of keeping Tjukurpa – the ancestral stories, knowledge systems and cultural foundations that connect Aṉangu people to Country – strong across generations.

Among the exhibition’s three artists, Emily Cullinan stands as one of Iwantja’s most senior painters, with her vibrant, rhythmically animated canvases drawing on childhood memories of travelling vast distances across the APY Lands with her family while living according to Aṉangu tradition. “We have really good memories from those days,” says Cullinan, a name visitors to Michael Reid Southern Highlands will know from a succession of warmly received group showings at our Berrima gallery.

Raylene Walatinna has developed a distinctive visual language that honours Country while extending a remarkable artistic lineage. She is the daughter and frequent collaborator of acclaimed artist, Iwantja director and, as of this year, four-time Wynne Prize finalist Betty Chimney, and through their collaborative practice, the two artists continue the custom of older women passing cultural knowledge to younger generations. “My mum has always been my closest friend. I learnt how to paint from her,” says Walatinna. “Over time, I’ve developed my own way of working too.” The artists’ monumental 2022 painting Nganampa Ngura – Our Country is now soaring almost three metres above the NGA exhibition space as a spectacular centrepiece of the long-awaited, artist-led Ngura Puḻka exhibition and also features prominently in the NGA’s accompanying publication.

Completing the trio of Iwantja talents joining forces for Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku is revered Pitjantjatjara artist and ngangkari (traditional healer) Maringka Burton, who is also represented in the NGA show with a sprawling work she co-created with her friend, fellow Iwantja artist and frequent collaborator Betty Muffler. “We get on really well in all our work, both as ngangkari and now, when we are working on our paintings together,” says Burton, whose luminous compositions are informed by healing, memory and her enduring connection to her mother’s Country. “Betty and I, we go on spiritual journeys called marali, our spirits going to heal. We go at night to give treatments to the sick and we come back to ourselves.”

While distinct in their painterly approaches and perspectives, Burton, Cullinan and Walatinna are united by a shared commitment to carrying Tjukurpa forward through painting. Their works reveal the extraordinary vitality of a living cultural tradition in which memory, knowledge and responsibility are passed from one generation to the next. At a moment of historic national attention for the artists of Iwantja and the wider APY Lands, Michael Reid Southern Highlands is proud to bring these three leading artists together in Tjukuritja Kunpu Kanyitjaku – Keeping Stories Strong.

Mountain Made is a new series of exuberant botanical paintings by Louise Frith, returning the Eora/Sydney-based artist to the Southern Highlands with some of the most immersive works of her career to date. Building on the creative breakthrough of her celebrated Murrurundi exhibitions Understory and Tendrils and Tapestries, along with her debut collection at Michael Reid Sydney last year, Frith’s latest paintings delve deep into the bushland surrounding Pierce’s Pass in Blue Mountains National Park. Sketching in the field before returning to the studio, the artist closely observes the dense floral interplay of the landscape, its tangled undergrowth and resilient plant life emerging through sandstone cracks and beneath the canopy.

Moving with painterly gusto between passages of intricate, tightly controlled detail and moments of untamed, impressionistic abundance, Frith’s dazzling profusions of native wildflowers teem and grow to the very edge of the canvas. “Most people are enthralled by the big views, looking down the valleys, marvelling at the escarpment,” says the artist, “but I’m charmed by the details at my feet.” 

The works in Mountain Made are deeply informed by the cycles of destruction and regeneration that shape the Australian landscape. Pierce’s Pass was severely affected by the 2020 bushfires, and Frith recalls how visitors spoke of an eerie silence after the burn, a landscape emptied of birdsong and the usual din of the ecosystem. Returning in recent summers, however, she found the terrain transformed once more: “If you visit now, the landscape is thriving and the thrum of cicadas is deafening. It is full of life again,” says the artist. In this respect, the exhibition becomes a meditation on regrowth and renewal, celebrating the resilience and restorative power of the Australian bush within one of the country’s most sublime landscapes.

The rugged countryside of Tasmania’s north-west coast finds eloquent expression in Brooke Van Ruiswyk’s A Place of Belonging, her debut exhibition with Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

It is a landscape of rolling hills, sodden paddocks and heavy skies, dotted with wind-pruned macrocarpa and traced by shelter belts. This is the country in which Van Ruiswyk, and generations of her family before her, have lived and worked.

Drawing upon photographs and field observations, Van Ruiswyk returns to the studio and reconstructs her scenes with oils. There is a natural affinity between the medium and the world it describes: the dewiness of oil paint echoes the moisture-laden atmosphere of the landscape itself. Thick passages of paint lend weight and solidity to the hills, while more delicate applications capture the drifting mists and lingering fog.

Across the exhibition, the eye is repeatedly drawn upward to immense sheets of cloud. At times they are feathery; at others they loom low over the countryside, carrying the promise of rain. Van Ruiswyk grants equal weight to the physical grandeur of the terrain and these vast, granite-grey, skies. They are, in her words, “a central emotional presence” in the work.

In 2024, Van Ruiswyk received the People’s Choice Award in the Henry Jones Art Prize. Her work has also been recognised through three selections in the Glover Prize – one of Australia’s most prestigious awards for landscape painting – as well as finalist honours in the Lethbridge 20,000 Award in both 2022 and 2023.

The story behind this exhibition is a positive one — a shaft of sunlight cutting through the noise and shadow of world events that can seem beyond our control. Back From The Brink is a reminder that, with enough goodwill, good science, and community effort, we can pull back from the edge — and that this is worth celebrating.

Fiona Smith’s paintings honour the work of conservationists and communities who have fought to rescue bird species from extinction. She is painting birds that almost weren’t here.

Every species in this exhibition was, at some point, heading towards oblivion — reduced to dozens of individuals, their habitats destroyed, their futures a ticking timebomb. But thanks to the global conservation movement, here they are: surviving, sometimes thriving, and depicted among a fiesta of flowers.

Among them, Brazil’s Lear’s Macaw — that vivid blue jewel of the caatinga cliff faces — was down to just 60 individuals in the early 1980s. Today, there are more than 2,500. The majestic Trumpeter Swan, hunted almost to extinction across North America, now fills the skies of the great northern wetlands in its thousands. In New Zealand, whole islands have been cleared of introduced predators so that birds found nowhere else on Earth have somewhere safe to raise their young.

Since 2000, 25 bird species have stepped back from the Critically Endangered list. Of course, this is a drop in the ocean compared to the ongoing loss of species worldwide — but what these stories deliver is proof of something vital: that humans have the ability to repair some of the damage we have caused. That we are better off saving this planet — the only one we have — than ditching it to hitch a ride on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketship to Mars.

This collection is determinedly joyful and playful. It focuses on beauty and wonder. Each painting carries a name that translates as “hope” in a different language.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the reassurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965). Carson, a marine biologist and naturalist, is best known for her 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the devastating environmental effects of pesticide use — particularly DDT — on birds and ecosystems, and helped ignite the modern conservation movement.

Showing this month at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Placeheld gathers ten painters working within the landscape, each bringing a distinct sensibility to the question of place. Together, the exhibition offers a timely survey of some of the most compelling voices shaping landscape painting in Australia today. Placeheld features new work by Anh Nguyen, Anthea Stead, Cate Maddy, Kate Vella, Libby Wakefield, Meg Walters, Sam Wilkinson, Suzie Riley, Tara Price and Zoe Grey.

Anh Nguyen’s Offcuts brings together a suite of small-scale paintings that turn a close, attentive eye to what is nearest at hand. Working across still life and interiors, Nguyen begins, as she notes, “with what might otherwise be discarded: offcuts, leftover marks, fleeting glimpses.” A vase of freesias loosens into gesture; a figure half-held within a thicket of green; a child bent over a page, absorbed; a beach or roadside scene glimpsed in passing -each work feels caught mid-thought, as if the image has only just arrived and might just as easily dissolve again.