Collection Title:
Finding The Familiar
Collection Context:
This body of paintings explores the unexpected familiarity found in foreign terrain — where memory, migration, and place intersect. While each setting holds its own unique character, climate, and rhythm, these works seek out the shared language of nature that quietly connects them.
During recent travels across Europe — from the scorched hillsides of Italy to the seaside gardens of Suffolk, and the curated bushland of the Barcelona Botanic Gardens — I was continually struck by landscapes and flora that echoed the Australian environment; The sighing of She Oaks along an abandon track from pool to beach, the crumple of dry gum leaves underfoot on the walk to the ‘holiday shop’, and the towering silhouettes of hollyhocks of cottage gardens called forth visceral connections to familiar places. Being Australian, I’ve often felt the physical and cultural distance from the rest of the world — the island-ness of our vast land. Yet in these fleeting moments abroad, I experienced a strange intimacy with the landscapes before me. What should have felt foreign felt familiar. These paintings are meditations on that interconnectedness — a collapsing of distance, time, and place into painterly impressions that speak to how landscape, memory, and belonging are never truly separate.
This body of abstract landscape paintings explores the unexpected familiarity found in foreign terrain — where memory, migration, and place intersect. While each setting holds its own unique character, climate, and rhythm, these works seek out the shared language of nature that quietly connects them.
‘Finding The Familiar’ captures the sensation of home in unexpected places — a visual journey through recognition, resonance, and the quiet revelation that the world, though wide, is intimately woven together.
Photography Credit: Sarah Anderson @sarahanderson
