Uplands

Solo exhibition opening on 30 May, 2025

May 25, 2025

The inspiration for this show in a beautiful little gallery on the outskirts of Canberra, came from the local landscape - not just its beauty but the relationship it has with the city itself. It’s the expression of thoughts that have been building up in the back of my mind ever since I moved here in 2020. Let me see if I can explain it in a way that makes sense…

In Canberra, especially the southern suburbs, the houses and streets cover the valleys, interspersed between an array of hills and ridge lines on which, for some reason, no houses have been built. The city is a new one, barely 100 years old, built on what used to be sheep pasture. Most of the old forest had been cleared away by the white settlers, including on the hills, leaving the landscape bare and windswept. Only the higher rugged mountains on the southern and western fringe remained untouched.

As the suburbs spread, especially post-WW2, the hills became isolated and farms disappeared, leaving them to gradually slide into neglect. Some of them have been re-wilded by volunteer groups, while others are infested with imported weeds - scots thistle and brambles are now part of the local ecosystem, their seeds and fruits eaten and spread by native wildlife. The hills and ridges are the home of parrots and rosellas and kangaroo, occasionally shy wallabies as well. Here and there, old fence posts and gates can be seen, forgotten relics of the old farms.

Footpaths wander over most of them, some heavily frequented but many of them quiet, with just the odd local walking their dog or jogging after work, or like me, climbing in time for the sunset and standing there in wonder, taking in the golden light, the clean crisp air and birdcalls.

It’s like being in a different world up there, even though the suburbs are so close in the shadowed valleys below. And when in the suburbs, the hills are only occasionally seen as a backdrop to the streets, houses, shops and parks. Most people never climb them. Most people never seem to even look up.

It got me thinking of how blind we can be, as a species, to the nature that surrounds and births us. How presumptive we are, to carve and remodel the land to make it “ours”, and how much we miss out on by spending our lives in our manufactured environments.

We see our civilisation as a permanent, established thing, because we base our idea of reality on what we see in our short lifetimes, a mere blink of an eye compared to the age of the hills under which we live. What will this land look like in a thousand years, in a hundred thousand, in a million? It’s impossible to know, but highly likely that our city and whole way of life will be gone and forgotten.

I wanted to capture as many aspects of this as I could in my art.

Okay, enough of me talking. Here are the paintings I’ll be showing in Uplands, which opens at 5:30pm on Friday, 30th May, at the Kyeema Gallery, Capital Wines, Hall, Australian Capital Territory - and runs through till the end of June.

These works are all available - please contact me for pricing.