Rock Tree Flow

Eora/Sydney-based contemporary painter Miranda Joy Summers will make her Northern Beaches debut in April with Rock Tree Flow, having previously dazzled visitors to our Southern Highlands gallery with the captivating waterscapes of her entirely sold-out 2025 solo show. “For me, absorption of place is everything,” says Summers, whose new series can now be previewed by request, with in-person viewings available for a limited time at our Chippendale gallery. “However you approach it, the experience of the landscape has to permeate your whole being; it has to get into your soul. I absorb location through all my senses, especially on bush walks. I take endless photographs, capturing both the expected and the incidental.”

Using a painting knife and oil, Summers carves out the essence of water and land – the interplay between soluble and solid matter, negative and positive space, tumbling rock faces peeking through lacy thickets of foliage. Her knife strokes are deliberate, textural and expressive, drawing foreground and perceived distance into striking proximity and balancing the landscape’s visual density with the serene aura that is the sum of its parts.

Returning to her studio inside a rambling Victorian home wreathed by gardens on Sydney’s Lower North Shore – close to the Middle Harbour inlets where she captures much of her source material – Summers studies and manipulates her images, drawing over them with an iPad and playing with light and shadow. “Then I return to the site, revisit the atmosphere, take more photos and refine the emerging idea,” she says. “It’s a layered process of memory, observation and re-immersion. The final work is grounded in reality, but distilled through repeated looking, sensing and imagining.”

For previews and priority access to the artist’s forthcoming body of work, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au