Nicola Woodcock is well known to those who follow our Michael Reid Northern Beaches Gallery in Newport, NSW.  We are delighted to be presenting her first solo exhibition here in the Southern Highlands Gallery after her sold out showing here in Berrima as part of our exhibition in partnership with Country Style magazine, ‘Coast to Coast’.

Originally from the UK, Nicola is now a Sydney based artist. She has been a finalist in the York Botanic Art Prize (2020), a repeat finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize (2021 and 2022) and most recently the Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Award (2023). A self-taught artist, Nicola works from her studio in Terrey Hills on the edge of the Ku Ring Gai National Park.  

“I’m interested in developing a language to describe the Australian landscape and in particular the flora of the Sydney Sandstone Ridgetop Woodland which surrounds my home on the Northern Beaches. 

At the same time I’m exploring the possibilities of my chosen medium, the humble oil pastel. I work with a small palette without extending this range by blending or mixing the pigments, preferring instead to work with solid saturated blocks of colour straight from the crayon. The joy comes from finding colour combinations that excite me when placed side by side. I allow the medium to dictate the strength of lines and marks which means relinquishing a degree of control over the marks produced. The thick, chunky pastel crayons leave no room for fussiness, detail is pared back and I’m forced to search for the essence of the image. There is also a large degree of spontaneity in my work since I don’t re-work or layer any parts of the surface, once a mark is placed it remains.

Native plants are a constant source of fascination and I’m lucky to be surrounded by a rich backdrop of bushland, living and working on the edge of Ku Ring Gai National Park. I have encountered all of the flora in this collection in my day to day life. From pathways to car parks to deep explorations into the forest, the wilderness always feels close. Flannel flowers are spotted on the side of busy roads, defiantly growing there despite the development and traffic pollution. Secret groves of Waratahs are discovered in the national park where their stems have to be painted by rangers so they can’t be taken and sold. Huge Banksia flowers grab my attention, glowing orange and yellow like candles as do carpets of tiny Boronia and Wattle sprinkled like confetti on the forest floor. 

I take photos of anything that catches my eye and bring it back to the studio as a starting point for an artwork. Once I’ve studied and sketched out the forms of that particular species, the number of petals, the type of leaves, I put the image away and allow memory and intuition to take over. I enjoy the process of simplifying the complex density of the bush to develop motifs which describe the rocks, the leaf litter, and the flora. 

I met someone recently who remembers the area 60 or 70 years ago when the Waratahs grew abundantly. Most of us don’t know what has been lost. These are my notes on the bush in 2023.”

Nicola Woodcock – June 2023

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is honoured to present our first exhibition of works by artists from Maningrida Arts & Culture, a community in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory that has earned a reputation of excellence among collectors both in Australia and internationally.

Maningrida artists live on country and their work explores djang – an eternal, life-giving, transformative power that accounts for every aspect of existence. It also refers to the creation ancestor, the country where spirit resides and to ceremonial designs and songs that represent that being.

The area where the artists live encompasses 7,000 square kilometres of land and sea and the art reflects the diversity of over 100 clan estates and more than a dozen distinct languages.

This exhibition showcases works by a dozen highly skilled Maningrida artists. It includes carved wooden sculptures of tall, slender Mimih Spirits, which taught the first people how to survive in the rocky environment of the Arnhem Land plateau, as well as Warraburnburn, spirits that know the country intimately.

There are six stunning lorrkons, hollow logs decorated with totemic emblems that are used in mortuary rituals, and also seven bark paintings featuring the distinctive cross-hatching technique known as rarrk.

This is a remarkable collection that we are extremely proud to present and we encourage all our followers to grasp this opportunity and visit the gallery to see these wonderful works.

Alix Hunter is an Australian painter based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works predominantly in oil paint with a focus on harmony, simplicity and tonality. Alix’s practice explores small moments; the collected objects, organic form, colours and textures that catch our eye everyday. Assembly, arrangement and placement of those forms become rituals that pay homage to our curiosity, our experiences and our environment. She is particularly interested in these low key ceremonial moments and the melody of harmony and simplicity.

For this Special Release at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Alix has created nine intimate still lifes featuring Australian natives, fruits & simple vessels.

Alix has exhibited in numerous group shows in Melbourne and Sydney. Her work is held in private collections in Australia and overseas.

In this new body of work, Northern Rivers-based artist Kathryn Dolby has sought to bind multiple experiences of water that occurred over the past two years, on boards that were in varying stages of progress over that duration. Through her pregnancy, she began painting the ocean spurred by an incredible urge to be by the sea – where water became a meditative visualisation for water birth, and also the two major floods that occurred when she was full term.  The powerful experiences of the flood and of birth demonstrating how simultaneously destructive yet also healing and life giving this compound is – at once providing calm refuge with the meditative motions of the sea and also clearing a path in surges.

Dolby’s paintings are blurred, morphing, shifting, slipping landscapes painted from deep visceral memories, propelled gently by the words found in Olivia Laing’s novel, To the River: “The Slipping Landscapes of a Dream.” In her practice, Dolby’s preference is that her work ‘suggest’ and ‘evoke,’ enjoying to blur the bound between abstraction and representation – and the  freedom to play and tease at those sensations rather than painting a direct copy of the real world. It is her hope also that through the abstracted, ambiguous elements of the paintings, the work can extend beyond her lived experience and into something that can be carried by the viewer into their own world, memory and colour associations.

“I’m interested in the power, strength and also lightness of water. With thinned down, fluid layers of paint, fleshy tones of the body morph into waves, mountains into water, sky into sea, memories swirling, fading, and morphing into something new. Ripples through the subconscious like an untamed tide, intense and also gentle, solid and soft, liberated and new. These works are an ode to the power of the elements and their influence on our experience of the world”. 

~ Kathryn Dolby (2023)

As always,  colour is a huge influence on Dolby and her memories are replete with colour triggers from particular moments in time. The thick volcanic red mud from the floods that drew a line through the trees and landscape for weeks afterwards, magnifying the green tips of the trees against the sky. Choosing to focus on the green tips, the renewal of the trees and the hint at new life it suggested, it felt palpably more hopeful and light to focus her energy there. There is a kind of flood line that links and moves up and down the works – some of the lines are milky while others are muddy.

The initial challenge of  uniting works that were created over such a long span of time, with significant gaps between painting sessions was resolved by the artist’s habit of moving from board to board until they all cohered through layering, with the layers of memories, until the thread connected together in a clearer way. The result is a determined, honest, considered  and deeply feminine offering from one of our most talented emerging artists. Kathryn Dolby continues to push and evolve her practice, richly imbuing her work by life as she lives it.

– Amber Creswell Bell 2023

I have judged art prizes for much of my professional life and having done so, view the outcome of judgmental collective decision making – with some knowing behind the curtain horse-trading scepticism. Stuff happens behinds the scenes at art prizes. For having said all that, I do however, never miss viewing the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. There are always less shenanigans within Landscape prizes.

So, there I was in 2020 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales viewing the Wynne Prize, when I should turn the corner and run smack into the practice of Julianne Ross Allcorn. There was a painting of wattle, banksia, grevillea, waratah, gumnuts, gum blossoms, seeds and leaves from different native plants, a Gymea lily, and the wildlife of our bush. There was in that painting, and to be found in the artist’s practice in general, a gentle narrative of fire, regeneration, and wonder.

In a contemporary manner, Allcorn’s paintings to my eye, channel an earlier world of a more detailed observation and the Australian bush. Her paintings make use of raw plywood to create a unique negative space on which to work. The artist sketch paints in layers, sometimes panoramic in scope- but always hyper observant. From top to bottom, left to right Allcorn’s paintings read as if you are standing within a grove of native trees. In the gum trees, you see through the brush and into canopy, to witness a densely packed and active world.

As a viewing member of the public, I applauded the judge’s choice. As an art dealer, I was delighted that the artist had then- not a full exhibition schedule dance card. She does now and I am delighted, that once again, that Julianne Ross Allcorn is holding her second solo exhibition at my Southern Highlands gallery.

Michael Reid OAM, 2023

In this new body of work, Northern Rivers-based artist Kathryn Dolby has sought to bind multiple experiences of water that occurred over the past two years, on boards that were in varying stages of progress over that duration. Through her pregnancy, she began painting the ocean spurred by an incredible urge to be by the sea – where water became a meditative visualisation for water birth, and also the two major floods that occurred when she was full term.  The powerful experiences of the flood and of birth demonstrating how simultaneously destructive yet also healing and life giving this compound is – at once providing calm refuge with the meditative motions of the sea and also clearing a path in surges.

Dolby’s paintings are blurred, morphing, shifting, slipping landscapes painted from deep visceral memories, propelled gently by the words found in Olivia Laing’s novel, To the River: “The Slipping Landscapes of a Dream.” In her practice, Dolby’s preference is that her work ‘suggest’ and ‘evoke,’ enjoying to blur the bound between abstraction and representation – and the  freedom to play and tease at those sensations rather than painting a direct copy of the real world. It is her hope also that through the abstracted, ambiguous elements of the paintings, the work can extend beyond her lived experience and into something that can be carried by the viewer into their own world, memory and colour associations.

“I’m interested in the power, strength and also lightness of water. With thinned down, fluid layers of paint, fleshy tones of the body morph into waves, mountains into water, sky into sea, memories swirling, fading, and morphing into something new. Ripples through the subconscious like an untamed tide, intense and also gentle, solid and soft, liberated and new. These works are an ode to the power of the elements and their influence on our experience of the world”. 

~ Kathryn Dolby (2023)

As always,  colour is a huge influence on Dolby and her memories are replete with colour triggers from particular moments in time. The thick volcanic red mud from the floods that drew a line through the trees and landscape for weeks afterwards, magnifying the green tips of the trees against the sky. Choosing to focus on the green tips, the renewal of the trees and the hint at new life it suggested, it felt palpably more hopeful and light to focus her energy there. There is a kind of flood line that links and moves up and down the works – some of the lines are milky while others are muddy.

The initial challenge of  uniting works that were created over such a long span of time, with significant gaps between painting sessions was resolved by the artist’s habit of moving from board to board until they all cohered through layering, with the layers of memories, until the thread connected together in a clearer way. The result is a determined, honest, considered  and deeply feminine offering from one of our most talented emerging artists. Kathryn Dolby continues to push and evolve her practice, richly imbuing her work by life as she lives it.

– Amber Creswell Bell 2023

Alix Hunter is an Australian painter based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works predominantly in oil paint with a focus on harmony, simplicity and tonality. Alix’s practice explores small moments; the collected objects, organic form, colours and textures that catch our eye everyday. Assembly, arrangement and placement of those forms become rituals that pay homage to our curiosity, our experiences and our environment. She is particularly interested in these low key ceremonial moments and the melody of harmony and simplicity.

For this Special Release at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Alix has created nine intimate still lifes featuring Australian natives, fruits & simple vessels.

Alix has exhibited in numerous group shows in Melbourne and Sydney. Her work is held in private collections in Australia and overseas.

Alix Hunter is an Australian painter based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works predominantly in oil paint with a focus on harmony, simplicity and tonality. Alix’s practice explores small moments; the collected objects, organic form, colours and textures that catch our eye everyday. Assembly, arrangement and placement of those forms become rituals that pay homage to our curiosity, our experiences and our environment. She is particularly interested in these low key ceremonial moments and the melody of harmony and simplicity.

For this Special Release at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Alix has created nine intimate still lifes featuring Australian natives, fruits & simple vessels.

Alix has exhibited in numerous group shows in Melbourne and Sydney. Her work is held in private collections in Australia and overseas.

In this new body of work, Northern Rivers-based artist Kathryn Dolby has sought to bind multiple experiences of water that occurred over the past two years, on boards that were in varying stages of progress over that duration. Through her pregnancy, she began painting the ocean spurred by an incredible urge to be by the sea – where water became a meditative visualisation for water birth, and also the two major floods that occurred when she was full term.  The powerful experiences of the flood and of birth demonstrating how simultaneously destructive yet also healing and life giving this compound is – at once providing calm refuge with the meditative motions of the sea and also clearing a path in surges.

Dolby’s paintings are blurred, morphing, shifting, slipping landscapes painted from deep visceral memories, propelled gently by the words found in Olivia Laing’s novel, To the River: “The Slipping Landscapes of a Dream.” In her practice, Dolby’s preference is that her work ‘suggest’ and ‘evoke,’ enjoying to blur the bound between abstraction and representation – and the  freedom to play and tease at those sensations rather than painting a direct copy of the real world. It is her hope also that through the abstracted, ambiguous elements of the paintings, the work can extend beyond her lived experience and into something that can be carried by the viewer into their own world, memory and colour associations.

“I’m interested in the power, strength and also lightness of water. With thinned down, fluid layers of paint, fleshy tones of the body morph into waves, mountains into water, sky into sea, memories swirling, fading, and morphing into something new. Ripples through the subconscious like an untamed tide, intense and also gentle, solid and soft, liberated and new. These works are an ode to the power of the elements and their influence on our experience of the world”. 

~ Kathryn Dolby (2023)

As always,  colour is a huge influence on Dolby and her memories are replete with colour triggers from particular moments in time. The thick volcanic red mud from the floods that drew a line through the trees and landscape for weeks afterwards, magnifying the green tips of the trees against the sky. Choosing to focus on the green tips, the renewal of the trees and the hint at new life it suggested, it felt palpably more hopeful and light to focus her energy there. There is a kind of flood line that links and moves up and down the works – some of the lines are milky while others are muddy.

The initial challenge of  uniting works that were created over such a long span of time, with significant gaps between painting sessions was resolved by the artist’s habit of moving from board to board until they all cohered through layering, with the layers of memories, until the thread connected together in a clearer way. The result is a determined, honest, considered  and deeply feminine offering from one of our most talented emerging artists. Kathryn Dolby continues to push and evolve her practice, richly imbuing her work by life as she lives it.

– Amber Creswell Bell 2023

Alix Hunter is an Australian painter based in Naarm/Melbourne. She works predominantly in oil paint with a focus on harmony, simplicity and tonality. Alix’s practice explores small moments; the collected objects, organic form, colours and textures that catch our eye everyday. Assembly, arrangement and placement of those forms become rituals that pay homage to our curiosity, our experiences and our environment. She is particularly interested in these low key ceremonial moments and the melody of harmony and simplicity.

For this Special Release at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Alix has created nine intimate still lifes featuring Australian natives, fruits & simple vessels.

Alix has exhibited in numerous group shows in Melbourne and Sydney. Her work is held in private collections in Australia and overseas.