Based in South Australia’s picturesque Adelaide Hills region, Romany Mollison is a landscape painter working in oils to portray the beauty of her surrounds. The move to South Australia from Melbourne (via a few years in Sydney) – with her husband and young daughter – resulted in the adventurous restoration of a 130 year-old cottage on an orchard which was to become their home when first settling in South Australia. Through this experience, Romany completely fell in love with the rolling hills, misty valleys, orchards and vineyards of the Adelaide Hills. This landscape now informs all of her work. Romany’s paintings have a sense of quiet calm, romance, sometimes melancholy, and there is always a source of light emerging. Many thin layers are built up on the canvas and softly blended to give a feeling of being immersed in the landscape – the emotive qualities of fading light, storms and fog are the main inspiration. Romany’s work has featured as a finalist in the Glover Prize for 2022 and her painting “I’ll Wait For You” was awarded Highly Commended in the 2023 Glover Prize. She holds a Bachelor of Art (Design) and Post Graduate Diploma (Design) from RMIT in Melbourne.

“In my painting practice I am interested in capturing in oils those moments of stillness in the country where light and conditions are changing and a feeling of quiet descends, especially in winter. At my home in the Adelaide Hills we are lucky to be surrounded by the landscapes I love to paint; with gorgeous morning fogs, rollings hills and misty valleys. And further afield on our many family road trips I am always on the hunt for that atmospheric quality in the landscape..pines standing silent in vast paddocks; silvery winter light emerging from heavy rain clouds; glimpses of distant ranges in blues and purples. There is a sense of quiet, restorative calm in these winter landscapes.”

– Romany Mollison 2023

Sydney based photographer Scott Perkins makes his Southern Highlands debut in presenting Understory, a collection of visually arresting and technically marvellous still and lightbox photographs. Showing in our upstairs gallery space, Understory is our first photographic exhibition of 2023, and demonstrates the artistic and technical latitude afforded by photo-media disciplines.

Scott Perkins is a rising artistic voice whose superior technical skills have propelled his expedited success. Perkins creates abstract photographs that merge image, imagination, and material engineering, exploring photo-abstract outcomes in strikingly refreshing ways.

Understory follows Scott Perkins’ exhibition, Penumbra, which was exhibited at Michael Reid Sydney in 2022.

In this exhibition, viewers are treated to impeccably designed lightbox photographs that have been engineered entirely by the artist. Perkins’ lightboxes carry images of undisclosed landscapes as well as abstracted botanicals. Scott Perkins’ ability to navigate macro as well as micro imagery create a truly enjoyable exhibition experience, while demonstrating the artist’s impressive range.

On Saturday 15th July, the Southern Highlands Gallery team will host an afternoon reception with the artist in attendance. This event will take place from 3.00pm to 5.00pm, and we are now inviting those who wish to attend to be in touch.

Understory will exhibit at Michael Reid Southern Highlands until August 6th 2023. To discuss an acquisition of artworks in this exhibition please email willkollmorgen@michaelreid.com.au

Elizabeth Beaumont is an Australian emerging artist whose practice predominantly focuses on exploring abstracted landscapes and expressions of the bush. She is based in the Southern Tablelands of NSW and draws inspiration from various regions across the country, including Wallum Heathland, the Central Desert, Southwest Tasmania, and the country of the Ngambri/Ngunnawal peoples in NSW where she lives.

Beaumont’s artistic accomplishments are noteworthy and demonstrate her talent and potential. In 2018, she was a finalist and highly commended in the Glover Prize, a prestigious Australian landscape art prize. The same year, she was also a finalist in the Royal Queensland Art Society Young Artists Award and the Kangaroo Valley Art Prize in 2020. These accolades are a testament to her skill in creating evocative and thought-provoking art.

She was part of a group exhibition in 2022, where her art was selected by Amber Creswell Bell from the National Emerging Artist Prize & from seeing the piece Elizabeth entered, Amber promptly offered her a solo exhibition, her first, here in the Berrima gallery in May 2022.  Beaumont’s artworks showcase her unique style and distinct interpretation of the Australian landscape and her beautiful expressions of the Australian outback.

“I think it’s under-appreciated how ubiquitous birds are in everyday life in Australia, from remnant woodlands to the suburbs. You don’t need to see them to know they’re there. There’s always something calling.

I am fortunate to live in remnant bushland near Canberra which was managed by Ngambri/Ngunnawal people for millennia. It is rich in both rare and common bird species. Bird watchers will tell you that the best way to find a bird is to sit quietly  in good habitat for a long time and wait for the birds to reveal themselves to you. For me, this is also the best way to paint birds. 

In making these works, I could not cajole the birds to the surface. Initial marks spoke nothing of the birds, but with time they seemed to suddenly arrive unannounced. Often when I tried to move them through paint into something more recognisable, they would disappear, as if spooked. 

The challenge of knowing when to leave their subtle forms untouched, or coax them out of abstraction is as thrilling as it is terrifying. The layers of these paintings document my failures – the spaces where birds once were. Ultimately though, they also record that very brief moment that the birds are comfortable in my presence.”

Louise Anders is a representational artist trained in the classical method of painting and drawing.  Her art practice began in earnest in 2015 when she left her 10-year career as a scientist to pursue her ever-present passion for drawing and painting. She attended numerous workshops in Australia, before pursing full-time artistic training at the Grand Central Atelier in New York in 2016 and 2017 under the direction of Jacob Collins.  Louise and her family have recently moved back to her home town of Adelaide, Australia after more than 10 years away.  She has set up a studio in the Adelaide Hills where she is surrounded by eucalyptus trees, rose gardens, native flowers and fruit trees.  Louise has shown her art in numerous awards in Australia including being a finalist in the Moran Portrait Prize, Hans Heysen Landscape Prize, AME Bale Award  and Calleen Art Award to name a few.

Presently, Louise is drawn to painting fruit, flowers and leaves from the gardens that surround her.  She loves the continual cycle of nature, watching buds bloom, blossoms morph into fruit, leaves pale and fall.  She gathers her subjects by hand directly from her garden and the surrounding land.  Her drawings and paintings are all completed from life allowing her to observe, understand and interpret nature and light in all its complexity.  

After her successful showing at our Michael Reid Northern Beaches Gallery earlier this year, we are excited to give collectors another opportunity to acquire her highly sought after oil on board still lifes of apples & eucalyptus.

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