Invitations
09 Jun 2026 – 27 Jun 2026
This body of work interrogates the simple image of an empty chair as an invitation to sit and feel at home. In 2024 I began making landscape paintings populated with empty bentwood chairs, replacing the figures that have long featured in my work. These chairs were a familiar object from around my family’s kitchen table growing up. With the squeak and sway of their elegant, rickety forms they remind me of home.
In contrast, the landscapes featured in these paintings are far removed from the comforts of home. Drawn from a recent hiking trip in Tasmania, they range from cold and windy alpine peaks to towering coastal cliffs and dense rain forests. Displaced from around the kitchen table, I’ve painted bentwood chairs into these unlikely settings, in a fast-flowing river, awkwardly blocking a trail or tangled in prickly wildflowers. In these contexts, the chairs yield some of their comfort and familiarity to express a tension between the safety of home and an unpredictable outside world.
Annexing a space around the chairs are swathes of patterned textiles draped and pinched into peaks that hang uncannily in the landscape. The fabrics have modest, domestic origins from check tablecloths to pink linen curtains and crocheted blankets. However, with their exaggerated patterns and strange billowing forms they appear more ambiguous, wavering between unassuming decoration and smothering intrusion.
Rather than transplant the familiar comforts of home into the wilderness, these paintings draw out complex and shifting relationships between humans and the landscape, inside and outside, stillness and movement, comfort and risk. From their precarious vantage points the bentwood chairs no longer offer safe and restful repose, they invite the viewer to join their predicament.
