Weather Report

Lucy Vader returns to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with Weather Report, a major new exhibition extending across both the mezzanine and top floor galleries.

In this latest body of work, the Northern Rivers-based painter deepens her iconoclastic approach to the pastoral tradition. Weather Report gathers landscapes that seem to roil with shifting skies, rain-washed light, and sudden bursts of colour. Fields and paddocks stretch into distance, yet beneath their bucolic calm, Vader coaxes forth surges of painterly energy: skies dissolving into painterly abstraction, horizons blurred in atmospheric veils, unexpected eruptions of yellow, blue, and pink coursing through the scene like weather systems of their own.

“It’s wild and abstract,” Vader explains of her process. “I upset myself and I upset the canvas … I bash things out and then I try and calm it all down again so it becomes a patina of painting moments.” This restless rhythm produces works that hover between figuration and abstraction, their surfaces alive with the turbulence of mark-making.

The exhibition follows on from Vader’s recent celebrated series Exaltation in Sydney and Good Stock at Murrurundi, and confirms her place as one of the most vital painters of the pastoral working in Australia today.