Quieter Ground

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.