Beyond Nature brings together three artists who navigate the territories just left of the familiar, where landscape becomes feeling, vessel becomes story, and mark making becomes breath. Moving past picturesque notions of the natural world, this exhibition explores nature as an internalised force: memory's residue, migration's longing, and the living pulse of land and belonging. Through gestural painting, sculptural ceramics, and grounded abstraction, Rubyrose Bancroft, Ria Desiree, and Rachel Farlow each propose a nature that is felt rather than observed, a terrain of sensation, belonging, and quiet chaos. Here, the elemental is personal. The organic is emotional. And every surface holds time.
Rubyrose Bancroft
Bundjalung woman Rubyrose Bancroft is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice represents Family, Country, and Connection. Her swirling lines embody the land's breath, each mark a ripple effect of ancestral ties. Working across painting, ceramics, and claymation, she centres Indigenous kinship systems and the enduring presence of Bundjalung Country. Her visual language speaks to the energy that connects people to land through cultural practice, honouring water, ochre, and the riverbed as sites of belonging and memory.
Ria Desiree
A Filipina ceramicist and "third culture individual," Ria Desiree transforms clay through the meditative rhythm of coiling and the physicality of carving. Her sculptural vessels become storytellers, imprinting the "here and now" while touching on home, migration, and belonging. By applying hand building techniques and vibrant surface painting, she dissolves dichotomies between art and craft. The vessel's interior and exterior speak to what it means to hold memory, to travel, and to root oneself in an uncommon journey.
Rachel Farlow
Living and working in Queensland as a florist and nursery hand, Rachel Farlow creates gestural paintings where memory and desire produce an interplay of physical states. Each work is a non verbalised world, unfurling time in places that resist familiarisation. Her poured colour and atmospheric mark making echo Cy Twombly and Helen Frankenthaler, while the surface's mobility mimics quiet chaos, a dreamlike weather of internal and external reality. The viewer dives into uncontained events, a churn of emotions layered with hidden meanings, linking passages of time and place.