The two exhibitions at Anthea Polson Art, Queensland this June both capture the sense of immersion in nature. From Melitta Perry’s Traces In The Landscape, which combines the landscape with art iconography, to Beth Kennedy’s Afterglow, which allows the botanical to take an emotional form on the canvas. Both artists have a detailed and intensive painting practice – inviting time to spend with the artworks and view the layers of research and process.

Melitta Perry
Traces In The Landscape

Traces In The Landscape by Melitta Perry uses layered symbolism as an ode to the Australian landscape and the artists who found inspiration here. The acrylic paintings are highly detailed and are the result of extensive research and field trips into the places referenced in the artworks. Byron Bay’s Wategos and Tygalgah, to the Blue Mountains and Sydney Harbour, and the rural plains beyond, become the place markers for vintage furniture, Australian birds, and motifs from well-loved artworks.

Research has always been an important part of Perry’s methodology. “I ponder, and I daydream a lot, and I like to find connections, particularly with places and landscapes,” she says. “If I go on a field trip and I’ve found a place that I’m interested in painting, I will find out as much as I possibly can about its history.”

Her artworks tell the stories of places, and the art history imbued in the landscape. For example, Secret Garden, 2026, recreates an ode to Wendy Whiteley’s Lavender Bay Garden with nods to the iconography seen in Brett Whiteley’s paintings. Yet, the surrealism of objects creates a dream-like aesthetic. The landscapes are reduced, the birds peck away at things that shouldn’t be there – blue and white ceramics or vintage wicker chairs. Her rendering of acrylic paints, saturated to give an oil paint-like quality, creates a painterly language with a timeless aesthetic.

The artworks represent traces of legacy left in the landscapes. Brett Whiteley, Margaret Olley, Norman Lindsay, and the poetic collaboration Outrider, 1962 between Sidney Nolan and Randolph Stow. As Perry says, “such arrangements tell as much about the painter as the finished picture.”

30 May to 13 June 2026

Beth Kennedy
Afterglow

Deeply connected to her emotions, Beth Kennedy’s artworks are a reflection of self and her natural surroundings. In Afterglow, the motif of the botanical takes shape in abstraction. Florals bloom across the surface, full of colour, pattern, and blending line of mixed media.

2025 was a challenging year for the artist, and after a funeral, she considered how to maintain her connection to joy. “I was on the plane after the funeral, looking at the clouds, and thinking, how do I rebalance, and how do I regroup?” Kennedy shares. Painting is a way for her to process these emotions, seeking quiet beauty, optimism, and comfort in her colourful, experimental process.

For Afterglow, Kennedy uses several water-based media – Liquitex, ink, spray paint, acrylic gouache – but applies them to canvases rather than paper, working in a flow state to create contrast. “I like pouring the medium on and mixing it around,” she says. “I really like that flow effect and being able to get a translucent colour and blocks of opaque pattern.”

The works hover between abstraction, Japanese-inspired woodblock prints, and realism, a style she calls ‘abstracted botanicals’ with an emphasis on flattening the picture plane and colourful patterns. The motifs are drawn from the world around her – the swaying gums near her Brisbane home, or a rose from her mother’s garden in Victoria.

Kennedy seeks to inspire joy in her works, and for Afterglow, she turns to the metaphor of a fading fire. As the embers offer a last chance of warmth, the artist reflects on moments of wonder and connection even after grief and uncertainty.

27 June to 11 July 2026

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Emma-Kate Wilson is an art critic and design writer based on Bundjalung Country in northern New South Wales.

 

Anthea Polson Art
Queensland

Originally published in print – Art Almanac, June 2026 issue, pp. 27–32