Poetry Within

The paintings gathered in Poetry Within – an exhibition presented across Michael Reid Northern Beaches and Michael Reid Southern Highlands – reveal two complementary strands within Dalin Alejandrino’s practice.

At Newport, the artist turns towards the brightness of the coast. Blues, sea greens and pale washes of colour open the surface to light. In Berrima, the palette is swept into ochres, charcoal and muted greens, giving the work an earthbound presence. Seen together, the two exhibitions reveal an artist with a finely developed feel for the emotional possibilities of abstraction.

Alejandrino paints intuitively. Layers of acrylic and oil stick accumulate over the course of a studio session, moving between broad gestural flourishes and moments of close, staccato brushwork. Each mark responds to the last, so that a painting becomes a record of its own making rather than the pursuit of a predetermined image.

A horizon line, the edge of a ridge, light across water or a weather cell are suggested—obliquely—but never directly or literally described. “The environment and emotion are deeply tied for me,” she says. “There’s something in the act of layering that feels like uncovering both.”

A finalist in the 2024 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Alejandrino names Monet and Turner among her earliest influences. She returns to them for their handling of light—for the way atmosphere—a weeping sky, or a cloak of mist on the waterfront—can be worked into paint itself. For these masters, light was the organising force of their work, shaping its entire emotional tenor as surely as it carved and defined a cliffface.

Painting first became important to Alejandrino as a teenager. “Art was the visual language I could be expressive in,” she recalls. Growing up in a Khmer-Australian family in south-west Sydney, where her parents rebuilt their lives after arriving in Australia as refugees, she set those ambitions aside in favour of a more conventional career. She returned to painting after the birth of her daughter. “Painting was precious time to myself.” The simplicity of that remark is telling. The studio became a place where the demands of everyday life gave way to quiet—a whirring mind and a working brush.

Poetry Within marks Alejandrino’s first solo exhibition with Michael Reid, following her inclusion in the major group exhibition Quiet Tide at Michael Reid Northern Beaches in 2025.