Echoes of Matter

In Echoes of Matter, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Ben Liney offers a quiet yet powerful exploration of landscape painting through a distilled perspective on time, memory, and our place within the natural world. Working on the lands of the Bunurong people, Liney renders isolated geological forms in oil on canvas with a restrained palette and finely detailed brushwork.

These works do not depict expansive vistas, but instead focus in on solitary rock forms—elements of the landscape that endure across time. Stripped of their surrounding context, they become vessels of accumulated memory, marked by the slow, persistent forces of transformation. Through careful observation, Liney invites viewers into a more attentive way of seeing—one that mirrors the quiet persistence of the landscape itself.

His paintings are grounded in stillness and intimacy. They hold space for reflection, drawing out the quiet dialogue between matter and time, between place and presence. In doing so, Echoes of Matter positions landscape not as a passive backdrop, but as an active archive of change—one that subtly reflects our own shifting relationship to the world around us.