Originally from the UK, Nicola is now a Sydney based artist. She has been a finalist in the Northern Beaches Art Prize, the York Botanic Art Prize and most recently a repeat finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize. A self-taught artist, Nicola works from her studio in Terrey Hills on the edge of the Ku Ring Gai National Park.

“Grandiflorum means large showy blooms and I had this in mind as I selected the flowers for this collection. Always working from observation, I set up the arrangements in my studio finding best placements to reveal dramatic shadows. I am drawn to the shadow as much as the object and these large blooms cast exquisite shadows. I find the shadow isn’t a mirror image of the object in front of me but often tells a different story depending on the angle of light.” 

– Nicola Woodcock

Kayleigh’s work focuses on the complex relationship between human and environment. Using painting to untangle herself and understand the world we are navigating, while focusing on the fragility of our degrading landscape and attempting to reconnect the two. Her work lives in a state of metamorphosis between abstract and landscape, creating a textural and ever-changing field of colour interplay. 

Kayleigh (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Naarm (Melbourne). Kayleigh graduated with a first class honours in Interactive Arts. She  from the Manchester School of Art and Design in 2014 and shortly thereafter moved to Melbourne to continue her artistic practice.

Painterly, slightly romantic, and multi-genre this exhibition will showcase 7 exciting emerging artists of diverse background, approach and style to present their take on quiet simplicity and the mood that working in a restrained colour palette evokes.

Featuring works by:

Oliver Abbott

Karima Baadilla

Ella Dunn

Liam Power

Pia Murphy

Jennifer Ross

Sam Wilkinson

19th – 29th October at Michael Reid Northern Beaches

‘Days Like This’ is a body of work characterised by flurries of radiant colour and gestural mark making. Amber Stokie uses innovative ways of painting to communicate the richness and complex nature of contemporary life and her experience of life as a triplet. To structure her works, Stokie uses a variety of techniques that include employing both hands and multiple brushes simultaneously to create paintings loaded with gestural marks that interact; collide, combine, pull apart and unite. Experimentation is an important part of Stokie practice as she moves between abstract expressionism and figuration, believing both are helpful in conceptualising her work. Currently located in Geelong VIC,  Stokie holds a BA in Visual Art (drawing) from the University of Ballarat and recently completed a Master of Fine Art degree with Distinction at RMIT University, Melbourne.

“Choosing words for a show title to encapsulate visual matter is tricky…I like the word ‘between’- the definition seems to sum up both the painting process and how painting is entwined with life so well. “At, in, into, across or along the space separating two objects or regions’ and ‘in the period separating (two points in time)”. These paintings percolate and arise from times between, as I contemplate the deep crimson of a flower at dusk, to a child’s sweet plump face and the peculiar glow of the morning, to the brick colour dotting the steep streets down to the town, where a crane (what an eerie fantastical structure!) has been erected. There are so many ways to describe the colour red, and I don’t know where to begin, so I just start.”

Anh Nguyen was born in Melbourne and now lives and paints in Thirroul on the NSW South Coast, with her partner and 4 children. Her art practice arrived by way of a circuitous route, though she had never really let go of that pencil from the time she made the very first mark. She was awarded the Lyn McCrea Memorial Drawing Prize in 2020, and was also the recipient of the Basil Sellers Art Award in 2018. She has been a finalist in other well-regarded prizes such as the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award (2021), Rick Amor Drawing Award (2021), Dobell Drawing Prize (2021), Kilgour Art Prize (2020 – Highly Commended), and the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2019 and 2017).

Oliver lives and works in Sydney, his practice is informed by a background in filmmaking and animation, as well as an interest in architecture and the built environment. ‘I’m fascinated by public spaces that go unused or become unkempt. The wear, age and position of an object, or a building, reveals the hierarchy of our priorities regarding it.’

Photographing, manipulating and painting scenes provides an opportunity to omit or diminish objects, people and vehicles to distill the relationship between the components in the space. ‘I’m interested in how modulating surfaces and their intersections can evoke a sense of nostalgia, longing and reverence for a place.’

Someone will come along presents spaces void of people, activity and motion, where stillness awaits action. Ten scenes anticipating figures, vehicles, and movement. An acceptance of the ebb that facilitates the flow.

The subject is secondary to its depiction, here subject is a placeholder, vacant space is a necessary counterpoint to the principal objects. Negative space allows room to breathe, as solitude heightens the presence of company. For every peak there is a trough, circumstances change, and someone will come along.

Our lives are ruled and regulated by arrows – on traffic signs, in shopping complexes, on TV and computer screens. We reflexively heed their commands although they barely register on our consciousness. It’s only when an artist starts to notice this all-pervasive icon that it takes on another dimension. A symbol of our triumph over nature, the arrow abolishes our freedom of movement, telling us there is only one way to go.

Rex Dupain, like the painter, Jeffrey Smart before him, has become fascinated by arrows painted on roads and tarmacs, in cities and the remotest locations. The most minimal of artworks, they act as severe graphic intrusions on the landscape. Dupain’s photographs are found compositions in which every frame is dominated by that single, insistent sign. As Wordsworth wrote: “The eye – it cannot choose but see.” In everyday life we see, and we obey. In the gallery, these arrows are robbed of their motivating power, being cast in an entirely unfamiliar role as objects of contemplation.

– John McDonald

Raised in Oakland California, Emily first moved to Australia in 2005 and now splits her time between downtown Sydney and Gunning NSW. Her limited-release cityscapes explore Sydney’s historic surrounds. Rhythm, light and pattern inform and elevate everyday moments, and the work allows viewers to share in her personal visual narrative. ‘City Home’ follows her sold out 2021 solo show at Michael Reid Northern Beaches. Emily was also a finalist in the 2021 National Emerging Art Prize, as well as a previous Mosman Art Prize finalist.

‘City Home’ documents a geographically tiny slice of urban Sydney (Gadigal land). The paintings have a temporal grounding, charting the day from dawn over the morning to the long shadows of the afternoon, finally to dusk and nightfall. Each piece captures a specific moment in the changing light, and so the journey of these works is not in location but in time.

“My production of ‘City Home’ traversed the long 2021 NSW lockdown, when our physical boundaries drastically constricted again. As patterns and routines broke down – weeks and months rolling indistinguishably into the next – the cycle of the day became pronounced in its tight repetition and emerged as a central preoccupation in my work arising from this period.”

Jade Sibinovski is a Sydney artist who graduated with honours in painting from the National Art School in 2017. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions across Sydney.

For Jade, form and colour are inseparable modes of expression in her work. A background in advertising and graphic design, and now a dedicated painting practice, underpins her ongoing interest in expanding conceptions of reality beyond the visible by opening up the realm of imagination.

Using a process that references the chance and deliberation of collage, the works comes to life in a rather serendipitous way. The spark created from inadvertent arrangements arising from the assembling, dissecting and overlapping of cut paper shapes and images from disparate sources, acts as a portal into the unconscious.

Mining these terrains, she renders abstracted imagined worlds by manipulating and playfully contorting the materials while seeking to discover the unfamiliar and uncanny. Abstract forms collide in spaces where past, present, and future converge and morph into imagery imbued with a suggestive power, triggering imaginative speculation regarding their origins. The resulting compositions are then formally articulated before being translated to canvas.

Colour is a vital component at all stages of the process, particularly at the final stage of painting and mixing of oil paints, its vibrancy made more potent by bold shapes that act as the vehicle for expression, bringing a delicate calibration of colour to the fore. Through this the artist uncovers and develops her own personal symbology.

Jade’s intention with this body of work is to imply an atmosphere or a memory that invites the viewer into the space for a contemplative experience, activating their own imaginative associations when engaging with the work.

CHRIS DEWAR’s work is about the interplay of colour and shape, and the object-making of painting. Exploring scenes from the day-to-day environment, the forms are a play between abstraction and figuration. From his studio on the NSW Central Coast Chris Dewar’s practice includes painting, printmaking, and drawing. With these processes he builds dream-like compositions that hint at story and meaning but hide themselves from conclusions. There is a gentle humour and restfulness in his work, though the shapes and colours consort in ambiguity. “It’s this ambiguity that I keep returning to, continuing to clarify and distil the palette and compositions of my work.” Chris received his BFA (Painting) from The National Art School in 2012, also receiving the Indigenous Art Centre Internship Award in the same year. Chris received the Gosford Art Prize 2D Award in 2014 and the Defiance Award and Nock Foundation Award in the 2020 Paddington Art Prize.

“I work with painting and screen-printing using acrylic and oil paint on aluminium, timber and paper. The works are stacked shapes and colours, intuitively placed forms resting in a floating disorientation. The process is a life-cycle: laying down colours, sanding or ghosting them, and re-establishing them in ways which are similar but not the same. The repeated process eventually ends up as an object that includes both a history of the original source and decisions towards the new. The compositions never fully enter a new state, but rather veer back into transition.”

Conor Knight is an emerging Brisbane based artist and has been a finalist in the 2021 Lethbridge 20000 Small Scale Art Award, the 2021 Clayton Utz Art Award and the National Emerging Art Prize 2021.

Arranged is a small series of work exploring the genre of still life with an emphasis on composition. Each subject was captured from life with bold gestural marks in oil paint. The paintings were created through a push and pull of applying and removing marks until the essence of each subject was found.

Julz Beresford’s intent is for the audience to feel engaged with the energy of the landscape. Her works are both an expressive piece of the whole process, and an embodiment of how it actually feels to be there.

Her paintings have a sense of intense energy. She paints ‘alla prima’ with a vigorous and spirited application. Her finished works have a purposeful display of expressive layers of creamy impasto paint, which Julz often compares to cake icing.

Working from her plein air studies, she utterly enjoys creating her rich Australian palette. Her energetic process of working, contrasts with the quiet and considered moments she greatly enjoys while in the landscape, where she works in gauche on paper.

In this body of work Julz takes us on a journey. A discovery, mirroring her own, where she follows the river from the Upper Hunter Region through to the Hawkesbury River, her local backyard, then onto the Snowy Mountains.

Water in Julz’s work is a space of calm and rest in comparison to the bush, which is alive with colour and ordered chaos. Julz describes the textural application of her paint as extremely important in expressing her love of the rough scrappy Australian bush. ‘I find its messy chaos so captivating and want the viewer to feel transported there.’

Mixing and moulding the artwork into the story and emotions of her mind. A bold type of realistic expressionism where she relies on her memory to relay the essence of that place at that particular time.

Julz feels at ease in the outdoors. She shows a deep regard for the landscape, studying the flora in order to express the scene’s particular identity, which varies across her artworks.

The mountain scenes are reflective of spring’s melting snow which expose the native grasslands and flowers. The rocky windswept mountain tops bear truth to extreme alpine storms, with their distinct leaning snow gums creating a sense of drama.

The countryside in the Upper Hunter was awash with colour. The intense vibrant colours of these country artworks speak to Julz’s art practice, where she is particularity interested in expressing the place at that moment in time. To return in another season could tell a different story.

“I am always open to what I find in the landscape, even when I’m not looking. The magic of the place surprises and strikes a chord in me. Sometimes I try to capture it and sometimes it’s just there for enjoyment as I bank the memory.” Julz Beresford.

b. 1990, St. Gallen, Switzerland
Chanel Tobler’s work explores the fickleness and the fraught of our here and of our being. She is guided by her interpersonal relationships, place and space, time, nostalgia of home, feeling, and the dichotomies of our lived everyday.

Tobler refers to herself as a drawer, with paper being her most defining material. Used for its tactility and immediacy, paper and the drawing medium to Tobler feels tender enough to house the most private feelings, and versatile enough to bear the loudest emotions. It is a practice that gives way to an intuitive exploration that is inherent to Tobler’s immediate experiences and sense-making of her surroundings.

Tobler currently lives and works on Gadigal land, the unceded land of the Eora Nation. Graduating from the National Art School in Sydney with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2017, Tobler works on personal and commissioned projects

“… with the exception of love, there is perhaps nothing else by which good people of all kinds are more united than by their pleasure in a good view”
Sir Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, 1949

Melanie Waugh’s paintings of creeks, coastlines, and rainforests capture landscape scenes in response to her musings through the world. Taking natures gateways and windows as her formal subject matter this exhibition presents a body of work capturing the moment of sublime often encountered in bushwalking or hiking when a traveller catches glimpse, through the natural framing of trees and shrubs trees, of a striking view of their destination.

She addresses the spirit and form of landscape painting in the use of post-impressionist style broad brushstrokes, rich earthy colour palettes and contrasting light techniques geographically linking these works to the vibrant and energetic natural beauty of the stretch of land between the Mid-North and deep South Coast of New South Wales.

Waugh’s paintings capture a beauty and allure true to the rustic Eastern Australian Coastline. From beaches, to bushland, open roads and starry canopy’s Waugh’s paintings express the connectedness of land, sea and sky, with a distinctly Australian outlook. A paradise of untamed vistas, seascapes, ocean pools, overgrown flora and foot flattened desire lines in which the viewer can be both lost and found. Beauty and Danger presents a paradise that, once experienced, forever holds you captive.

Her paintings are pictorial pilgrimages continuing in the grand narrative of Australian landscape painting. The boundless-ness characterized in the snippets of sublime presented in each work suggestive of the infinite breadth of Australia’s plain.

Words by Elizabeth Reidy

About the Artist

Based in the valley of Bellingen on the NSW Mid North Coast, Melanie Waugh has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School and a Master Of Arts from UNSW. In 2018 she was awarded 2nd place in the Art in The Open Landscape Painting Prize. Melanie has been a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran Portraiture Prize (2017), a finalist in the Hawkesbury Art Prize (2019),a finalist in the King’s School Art Prize (2020) and this year is a finalist in The National Emerging Art Prize.
This is her first solo exhibition with Michael Reid Northern Beaches.