Michael Reid Northern Beaches is excited to announce Sea of Life – our first solo exhibition from the winner of the National Emerging Art Prize’s inaugural award for photography, Penelope Green. On view next month at The Garden Gallery in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden and now available to preview by request, Sea of Life was completed during a yearlong professional mentorship awarded to Green as part of NEAP’s $10,000 photography prize, now the Seed Prize for Emerging Photographers.

“Penny has that unique and enviable eye – a photographer with a painterly sensibility,” says NEAP’s curator and co-founder, Amber Creswell Bell. “A keen observer of Australian life in her Newcastle locale, she taps into something familiar and known, while also shining a light on details that we, the layman, perhaps overlook. I find her knack with compositions and colour particularly compelling.”

In Sea of Life, Green swims through scenes of sanguine oceangoers – women whose daily rituals at the Newcastle Baths and beyond the breakers have fostered a community bound by a collective yet solitudinous embrace of the elements. While serving as compelling works of social documentary photography from an artist deeply embedded in the milieu she depicts, Green’s images also transcend the everyday through arresting and disarming compositions that convey the freedom and bracing embodiment felt by those who live for the sea.

“For many of us, the ocean serves as a third space,” says Green. “A place where we go alone or with our favourite people to meet our need – or obsession – to simply be in the sea. My evolving practice, documenting sea communities and experimenting with abstract work, is performed on a nature-based stage. From the beach, ocean baths bleachers, or in a lap lane, I witness the interactions of all who, like me, have a compulsion to be beside the sea. Like every ocean swimmer, I understand the abandonment of self and bone-deep joy that immersion brings, and bear witness to the ocean’s role in wellbeing and community.”

Green triumphed at NEAP with her work Gil and the Moon, which became the springboard for her new series and will form a centrepiece of her Garden Gallery show. Capturing a friend’s ecstatic embrace of the sun and sea at the Newcastle Baths, Green’s work recalls the iconic beach scenes of pioneering modernist Max Dupain, whose lensing of Australia at leisure helped crystallise a national self-image as one bound to the freedom, optimism and salubriousness of the outdoors. Gil and the Moon feels like a contemporary woman’s answer to those indelible pictures – an expression of female joy, unfettered autonomy and elemental rapture at the edge of the littoral zone.

“Buoyed by the women who join me, I find the courage to swim far beyond the surfers, into the open sea,” says Green. “It’s here that the strength and grace of the sisterhood truly reveals itself, and it’s this nuance I strive to capture in my images.” Returning to the same seaside settings most afternoons, Green sensitively observes her subjects – local friends and familiar strangers – and the play of light as it softens, shifts and reflects across the water and built forms. “In a permanent state of flux, the ocean is our metaphor for life: challenging and rewarding in equal measure,” says the artist. “What doesn’t change is what it represents: a place of refuge and solace, a place to connect with ourselves and one another and nature. A place where we are reminded that we are all simply specks in the sea of life.”

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is thrilled to announce Auspicium – the solo exhibition debut of 2025 National Emerging Art Prize winner Alexander Bebbington. Presented by Michael Reid Northern Beaches and available to preview by request ahead of its showing in November at The Garden Gallery in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, Auspicium is the culmination of a yearlong professional mentorship that formed part of Bebbington’s suite of prizes when he claimed NEAP’s ultimate accolade, the $20,000 Morgans Financial Prize for Emerging Painters, for his work Little Pied Cormorant.

“Alex really caught the attention of the judging panel last year, with his unique take on fusing painting and photography in a way that tricks the eye as to where the photography ends and the painting begins,” says NEAP’s curator and co-founder, Amber Creswell Bell. “They are at once very fresh and contemporary, but also classically nuanced. Exciting to see this work develop!”

With Auspicium – subtitled Signs, omens and the natural world – Bebbington builds on the creative breakthrough of his NEAP work with a new series of mixed-media still-life vignettes. While invoking the conventions of museum classification, spectacle and display, each of his wunderkammer-like photographic scenes is inscribed with intricately painted critters – native birds, bats, possums and insects whose nested, vital presence upends any sense of scientific remove and brings the natural world roaring to life with expressive painterly verve.

“This series builds on the visual language I established in Little Pied Cormorant, particularly the combination of photography, painting and constructed still-life environments,” says Bebbington, who meticulously constructs his photographic tableaux before painting directly onto the printed surface. “I have continued exploring the relationship between natural history, beauty and loss, using birds, insects and collected objects to create scenes that feel both familiar and slightly unsettling.”

Bebbington traces the origins of this distinctive approach to his formative encounters with the natural history collections of Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, where he became fascinated by taxidermied birds arranged against painted backdrops of their native habitats. Reversing this convention, he began introducing painted wildlife into photographed environments, developing the hybrid visual language that defines his practice today. His work draws on the seductive theatricality of Baroque still-life painting and the rich symbolism of the classical vanitas tradition, recasting these historical influences through a distinctly contemporary lens attuned to ecological fragility and the consequences of human intervention.

Beneath the vivid colour and artifice of Auspicium lies a disquieting meditation on preservation and loss. Bebbington is drawn to the paradox of the natural history museum – a place dedicated to conserving and celebrating the living world, yet filled with specimens removed from the environments that sustained them. His compositions carry something of this contradiction, with their beguiling beauty shadowed by a sense of absence and the possibility that the creatures we seek to preserve might one day survive only as objects of study.

“There is something surreal and beautiful about these spaces, but that beauty is accompanied by a deep sense of sadness,” says Bebbington. “I think these spaces are fundamental to preserving our natural history and crucial to education, but we don’t want them to be the last place a species is held.”

The new series also marks a significant development in the scale and ambition of Bebbington’s practice, with larger, more commanding works that push the possibilities of his mixed-media process. Together, these individual tableaux form a richly layered reflection on the ways we encounter, interpret and value the natural world.

Taking its title from the Latin term associated with the ancient practice of interpreting omens through the observation of birds, Auspicium invites a different kind of augury – one in which the fate of the natural world might be read in the creatures surrounding us and in their enmeshment with our domestic habitat. Marking an auspicious beginning for Bebbington’s exhibition career within the Michael Reid fold, Auspicium heralds the arrival of a distinctive new voice, uniting technical ingenuity, visual exuberance and an urgent environmental consciousness.

For previews, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au.

Caressa Gonsalves is a ceramic artist raised on the Northern Beaches, on the shoreline of Palm Beach. Her works are a mix of contemporary ceramic pieces, from sculptural vessels to vases, embracing natural imperfections and reflecting on handmade craftsmanship. She is inspired by the shoreline and her early years. Caressa’s works explore a contemporary vision that draws from the natural world, surrounding seascapes, found objects and ocean life, symbolic of her upbringing on the coastline of Australia.

“I was raised on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, growing up along the shoreline of Palm Beach. My family were the founders of Gonsalves Boat Shed, a little fisherman’s shack beside the ferry wharf, passed down through generations. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are rooted there, surrounded by the ocean, boats and the textures of the coastline. I have always had a deep connection to the ocean. After losing my parents at an early age, I spent many years avoiding grief and the emotions that came with it. Clay became a way of working through what I had kept stored inside me. I use the vessel as a canvas to explore emotion, memory and the movement of the sea. Working intuitively, I throw and hand-build curved forms, layering found clay slips, textures and moulds taken from the boat shed and coastline. Rope, shells, erosion and wave-like structures become embedded within the work. I embrace the natural imperfections of the clay, allowing the process to remain fluid and unpredictable. What began as a way of finding solace has become an ongoing exploration of memory, grief, place and my enduring connection to the ocean.”

For Liam painting is a way of seeing what is right in front of him. A kind of looking, through a window or lens. An intuitive connection between eye, hand and surface. A ritual or sort of visceral dance that is played out within the studio. When painting Liam is interested in forms that resonate within; knife blades, carcasses and meat cuts. How we consume, how we survive. Liam also works as butcher.

Speaking on this most recent series, Liam explains how

Over time the butchers block becomes this surface of subtle, worn down gradients. You can feel them if you run your hand over it. A kind of wave in the timber that is pleasing to touch. This is done by a knives edge over time, repeated cutting and slicing motions. Akin to water slowly eroding the surface of stone. Visually these are the irregularities I’m interested in. 

Camille Manley is an Australian painter based in South East Queensland, whose layered, gestural canvases translate the rhythm and atmosphere of place into fields of colour, mark and light. Raised on Ngunnawal Country, the bushland and Brindabella Ranges around Canberra still inform her visual language, shifting between open, atmospheric passages and more illustrative detail as she explores how we view ourselves within the landscape.

A COFA graduate who spent years in design in Sydney before returning to painting in recent years, she has shown across Queensland and New South Wales with solo exhibitions in 2021, 2024 and 2025. Camille has been a finalist in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, the Harden Art Prize, and her paintings are held in private collections nationally and internationally.

In the two years since Dharawal-based painter and Anaiwan woman Miranda Hampson appeared in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, her practice has gained remarkable momentum. In 2026 alone, she was selected as a finalist for the Hadley’s Art Prize, Mosman Art Prize, Goulburn Art Award and Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, receiving the inaugural Installers’ Choice Award at Mosman.

Hampson’s paintings combine considerable technical accomplishment with a sustained interest in material, place and Indigenous knowledge systems. Esoteric Lore, following her 2025 exhibition Vantage, extends this enquiry through an increasingly delicate and exacting language of paint. Across some of the largest canvases of her career, minute marks accumulate into filaments, ripples and dense fields, giving the surfaces a quality that is at once woven, organic and impossibly weightless.

The fishing net provides the collection’s central image. In certain works, it is recognisable as an object, suspended against a neutral ground or caught in shadow. Elsewhere, it spreads across the canvas, becoming almost abstract and, in places, suggestive of cracked earth. For Hampson, the net offers a compelling way of considering Country as a system of interconnected relationships. “Fish traps do not resist movement entirely; they work with currents, migration and seasonal change,” she says.

There is something apt, too, in the way the net is made. Each line depends upon the next, as thread depends upon thread. Hampson recreates this structure entirely in paint, and beneath that lies the linen canvas itself, already woven. There are, in other words, several kinds of making held within a single surface: the weave of the canvas, the weave of the net, and the ‘stitching’ of paint.

This same kind of thinking is extended, with similar rigour, across other phenomena and subject matter, all suggestive, in some way, of a balanced coexistence with Country, or a call to repair these missing links.

The long strands of kelp in The Shape We Take bend with currents and tides, dancing in response to the water around them, bringing a distinctly more fluid kind of reciprocity to the fore. “The organisms that sustain the world are often the least visible,” says Hampson. “Like phytoplankton and kelp, they remind us that life persists through countless acts of exchange and connection beyond our immediate view.”

Our last five years in Newport have been a wonderful ride, showcasing an incredible array of stunning artworks from talented artists across the country. As we take the next step in the gallery’s journey, moving to our new, larger gallery space in Brookvale, we wanted to thank you for all your support over the last five years of Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

As a token of our appreciation, it is our pleasure to invite you as one of our qualified customers, to this special one-of-a-kind sale. We look forward to you joining us on the next phase of our adventure.

For all enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

The Michael Reid Northern Beaches team has curated an abuntant selection of perfectly petite paintings to bring intimate yet enriching moments of beauty, grace and interest to our smaller spaces. From elegantly composed still-life vignettes to landscapes distilled in miniature, these bijou canvases possess a poise and impact that belie their scale, offering jewel-like points of focus that draw us into their micro-worlds.

Many of the bright stars of our gallery’s stable and broader exhibitions program are represented in this collection, including Melanie Waugh, Conor Knight, Louise Knowles, Lauren Jones and more. Whether tessellating to form a sprawling salon or hanging solo in the powder room, kitchen nook or on a library shelf, there is a work in this collection to suit every style and space – or make a perfectly proportioned gift.

Explore our Small Works Salon online and in the gallery until 26 September. For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

Eora/Sydney-based artist, Drew Truslove turns his attention to the Australian coastline. Working with a single colour—a luminous, mineral blue – Truslove’s landscape are drawn in near-continuous fields of marks, looping, searching and restless. His line doubles back, thickens and disperses, at times so fine it seems to hover just above the canvas, then gathering weight along the spine of a trunk, or in the articulation of roots gripping the bank. Ink proves uniquely suited to this task. It follows the slip of a hand without resistance, registering each pause and surge of confidence. Drew Truslove proposes a different way of seeing landscape. In choosing ink as the final medium, he makes a decisive claim: that a line and a single colour – drawn with clarity, patience, and an acute responsiveness to the world – can hold the vastness, force, and subtlety of a landscape. Named Runner-Up in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, and recipient of the Award of Excellence in the Morgans Financial Prize for an Emerging Painter for ‘Flat Rock, River Crossing, 7th Angle’, Truslove is an artist of growing stature. Waterlines is his fourth solo collection with Michael Reid – with his prior three collections selling out in their entirety.

“I am an Australian artist who works predominantly in ink on canvas. This current series leans into the human experience of beaches, with people playing in the shallows and strolling on the sand. We spend a lot of time in the water as a family and I love capturing those shoreline interactions with people fossicking about the shoreline. The humans are quite secondary in this series; I find myself portraying people in landscapes in a fairly rudimentary and brief way, cameos against the backdrop of the star of the show. I’ve enjoyed looking different ways of representing the water and look at the different kinds of trees that we see on these coastal landscapes.”

For many years, the human figure has been a constant presence within Clare Dubina‘s practice. She has returned to it again and again, exploring the body not as a portrait of a particular person, but as a way of expressing something less tangible: emotion, identity, vulnerability, connection and the quiet complexity of being human.

The figures within these works exist in moments of occupying space together and alone. They reflect the many ways we move through relationships with one another and with ourselves: seeking connection, finding comfort, creating distance, offering support, or simply existing alongside another.

But In Relation also speaks to Dubina’s own relationship with the figure as an artist. After years of returning to the human form, this body of work represents a culmination of that exploration. It is an opportunity to reflect on what the figure has allowed Dubina to express, discover and understand, while also making space for what comes next.

The figure is familiar, yet endlessly open to interpretation. A body can hold emotion without speaking. A gesture can suggest an entire inner world. And two bodies sharing space can say something about connection that words cannot.

In Relation is ultimately a reflection on connection between bodies, between people, between the inner and outer self, and between an artist and the subject that has accompanied Dubina for so long, and a quiet acknowledgement of where her work is beginning to lead me next.

Nicole Steenhof (b. 1990) is a visual artist currently working with oil painting and post consumer sculpture based in Shoalwater, WA. Completing post-graduate studies with distinction in Fine Arts at Curtin University in 2024, Steenhof has since had multiple works acquired by public collections including John Curtin Gallery and the City of Melville. She has been a finalist in many art awards throughout WA, including Mandorla Art Award and Castaways Sculpture Awards, and won Emerging Artist at Royal Prize for Landscape award in 2024.

Swimming in the ocean through the seasons has given me an appreciation for all of the different qualities each day brings – the same ocean is new every time. It has helped me find an embodied way of painting the ocean. The paintings have ribbons not only of dark and light, but of shape formed by colour. Oil paint is applied and removed, allowing the underpainting to gleam through, much like the water is understood by its opaque reflection of the sky and also its transparent substance. The paintings mimic the way the ocean shifts, disappears, reappears.

Through swimming, you experience a sense of one’s own wateriness and a fading of boundaries between the depth beneath, the reflection of the sky, and between bodies of water (yourself and the sea). The title of the collection is based on a resolution to a dream that my daughter had, where the ocean filled our home and yet it didn’t matter to my daughter who said she found ‘a window to swim through’. It’s my hope that these paintings function in a similar way, that the paintings of the ocean become a window to swim through, a portal of freedom.

In Diary of an Artist Kerri Kerley’s paintings offer a visual diary of daily life. They represent moments, and memory over time, exploring a world the artist finds fascinating and bewildering.

Water is a recurring theme in this latest exhibition. A place of mystery and magic, with kaleidoscope of colours and reflections of trees and sky. Describing her connection to the water in Diary of an Artist, Kerri explains “I am fortunately spoilt for choice with so many beautiful rivers and creeks where we live, they are a reminder of my childhood and take me back to when I would spend hours searching for tadpoles, watching and waiting for them to turn into frogs and watching dragonfly skipping across the water.

For Kerri, a painting is more successful when there is an established relationship or connection with the subject. “There is an unexplained exchange of energy that somehow translates onto the canvas, enabling me to think in colour, form, composition and light, coming together to communicate the feeling of being immersed in the landscape.”

For all enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au

After completing her Masters of Architecture at the University of Queensland Sophie worked as a lead designer with Urban Art Projects in public art for 5 years. Sophie now works as a full- time artist in her home studio in Brisbane. Winner of NEAP painting prize 2022. Winner of Saint Cloche wall works award, Little Things Art Prize, 2021.

At the heart of Sachs’s practice is a fascination with light’s ephemerality, expressed through meticulous arrangements of commonplace objects that bask in direct sunlight. Shadows play an equally vital role in her compositions, weaving an interplay of form and void that pays homage to the still-life tradition while reinterpreting it, capturing the optical effects of light in its most curious arrangements.

“My paintings do not seek to be extremely realistic. I selectively highlight details that inspire and interest me while allowing other elements to become more stylised and retain a painterly quality,” says Sachs. Her work operates in a two-fold approach: an immediate impression of luminous light and colour, followed by a more intimate exploration of detail.

Light of Nature explores the sensory experience of light, place, and belonging in painting. The series started in Mantova, Italy, where Helle was artist-in-residence in 2025. There, she dyed/painted sheer silk works while immersing into the countryside. An awe-inspiring process that continued as Helle travelled via Denmark to Australia, before painting this luminous new series in the studio.
Embodied memories of each place are reflected through translucent layers of paint. Rather than a depiction, the work unfolds recent and distant sensations through gestural movement. Earthy tones merge with Nordic hues and a sense of fluidity. Always following the horizon—and beyond—an ever-present line connects each work, and the notion of living in, and between, light and place.

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is delighted to present our 2026 End of Financial Year Edit: a selection of paintings and sculpture chosen for the originality, energy, warmth and beauty they bring to interior spaces.

Running from 15–30 June, this curated edit brings together works by artists whose practices span abstraction, landscape, still life and sculpture. From Melanie Waugh’s sun-drenched coastal scenes to Nicole Steenhof’s atmospheric abstracted waterscapes; from Meg Walters’s richly layered surfaces to the still-life precision of Sophie Sachs, each work offers a distinctive approach to colour, light, texture and form.

Alongside paintings by celebrated artists Kathryn Dolby, Emily Gordon, Debbie Mackenzie and Lauren Jones, the edit also includes an extraordinary ochre-pigmented cottonwood sculpture by Jeremiah Bonson, bringing a powerful sculptural presence to the collection. Together, these works offer a range of approaches, moods and materials, presenting opportunities to acquire original pieces by some of the most compelling artistic voices working today.

For all enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au