Shaun Daniel Allen’s fourth solo exhibition, 'Between Lands', charts a journey through resonant spaces encountered over the past eighteen months. The paintings are built from traces of movement and memory. Colour acts as a navigational marker, with specific hues pulled from the environment and reappearing as echoes of place. These works document the flow of water, land, and life, compressing time to merge past, present, and future into a single visual field.

The exhibition reflects a process of returning and grounding. The artist’s distinctive lines, developed across previous bodies of work, now intersect with new backgrounds drawn from recent landscapes. This is not a rupture but a deepening, a practice where the artist becomes a conduit. Each painting functions as a portal, holding the energy of a suspended moment, from the quiet tension of an interior to the vibrant stillness of a forest clearing.

To stand before these works is to enter into their logic. The paintings impose their own residue, leaving traces on the viewer. You become part of the exchange, carrying the impression forward. 'Between Lands' orients us to the narratives embedded in place, revealing the enduring presence of Country across all terrain.

Between Lands is a meditation on place and is infused with traces and movement between places. 

Traces of colour are always something that stand out the most to me in any environment. Waiting for the environments to show me all the hues it has to offer. For those colours to be embedded in my mind, and act of reminders of place when I see them elsewhere.  

Traces of colour and hue that haunt the artists memory of the places he has moved through…

Traces of movement in and out of land, the traces of movement within land, of water, flora, fauna, the city and the country…

Traces of past work, memories of movement and form, the traces of a process of grounding in which the artist feels he is a vessel…

Traces of objects over time, the way that traces bend time out of linear experience, merging past, present and future…

You follow traces to orient yourself when moving within and between lands. The past is alive and present in each step. Traces form a narrative, a journey. You walk into a room and the air is thick with energy… you trace an upturned chair, a broken bottle, a tooth, a bloodstain, the air is thick with calamity and tension, time is suspended, you are overwhelmed with traces of past and present danger… you walk into a forest clearing and all is silent, you trace a groove bored into the side of a branch, a sun-bleached fallen tree, the moment of stillness erupts into life and the clearing pulsates with energy as trails of ants resume their labour, an inquisitive bird cocks its head at you, the grass beneath you wavers… 

I was feeling like my work might change drastically due to all these new influences. They’ve circled back and doubled down on familiarity. I’m merging new backgrounds drawn from these landscapes with the lines I’ve been working on for the last few years. 

In Between Lands we see an artist retracing his steps into moments and places that have resonated over the past 18 months since his last exhibition... We experience the bending and folding of time, retracing between lands, tracks and traces, colour and hue. We are immersed into the painting as an event which will leave its own traces on us. We become a part of a process, we become vessels ourselves. A painting is a portal, we move between lands, we are immersed in colour, stained... we stain all that we touch and are touched by, we carry traces forward.

Artworks and our understanding of events, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of where we are and how we got there… traces and impressions, colour and form…

DX

China Heights Gallery, in collaboration with Louis Vuitton, presents a new exhibition of works by Australian artists Banjo McLachlan, Rachel Rutt, and Gabriel Cole. Hosted at the Louis Vuitton Brisbane flagship, the show brings together three distinct practices that explore visual culture, memory, and emotional expression.

Banjo McLachlan, Born and raised in Newport on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, was introduced to photography at a young age by his father. His fascination with the craft saw him leave school to pursue photography studies, leading him into a career as a paparazzi photographer, capturing high-profile celebrities visiting Australia.

Relocating to New York, he expanded his focus to documentary photography, shifting from the realm of fame to documenting the rich stories of ordinary people and exploring the essence of urban life. Early exposure to photography fostered an appreciation for scanning, developing, and printing, shaping his artistic foundation. Influenced by music, skateboarding culture, and the aesthetics of 90s and 00s fashion photography, he draws inspiration from the interactions between people and their environments, merging these elements with his perspective and evolving practice.

Rachel Rutt’s (b.1990) work observes humanity’s instinct for the nomadic and migratory, polarised against outcomes of alienation and isolation borne innate to the experience of Diaspora. Assimilation and adaptation, strained by the necessity of refuge, unearth a hunger for existence exceeding mere survival. Can the process of evolution redefine belonging? Does the landscape transform in response? This catalyst is the subject of Rutt’s curiosity. Comprised of woven mediums, whose warp and weft are manipulated to emulate the pathways of physical migration, the interplay of colliding worlds, chance, harmony, and adaptive reaction, Rutt’s work pays homage to both personal and shared experiences of Diaspora through the universal mechanism of weaving. Silken transparencies provoke memories and interpret history, conveying rhythm persistent in spite of chaos.

Gabriel Cole is an artist and designer based in Naarm/Melbourne, originally from Adelaide. His multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, painting, film, sound, and textiles, adapting fluidly to the conceptual demands of each body of work. Cole’s work is rooted in the exploration of semiotics and motifs, often incorporating signage and branding as visual and emotional entities. His approach combines a meticulous painterly technique with an embrace of organic imperfection, creating layered compositions where refined craftsmanship meets spontaneous abstraction. Materials are torn, folded, and disrupted, allowing for natural deconstruction while maintaining a deliberate sense of balance and form.

McLachlan, Rutt, and Cole challenge us to look deeper. By re-engaging with analog processes, their work masterfully explores the space between reality and illusion, past and present. In doing so, they reveal the profound power of images to shape new narratives and evoke unexpected emotions.