Two Tasmanian artists both evoke the emotions of their personal landscapes at Despard this September, though with entirely different methodologies. In the northwest of the state, Zoe Grey draws on the memory of place in both abstraction and text-based work, while south of Hobart, Joshua Andree turns his gaze upwards to muse on the ever-shifting sky.

Zoe Grey
Out Of The Blue

Working from her hometown Marrawah on the wild west coast of Tasmania, Zoe Grey returned home after suddenly losing her mother. Grief and reconnection with this remote coastal town seep into her works, channelling an active energy that grows and organically flows across the canvas. The rocks on the shoreline, the deep blue sea, and the weather that whips through the environment are translated into expressive abstract washes of colour and textural mark-making.

From studies and drawings of the landscape, Out Of The Blue considers memory and place in twenty-three works. “All places I’ve chosen to paint remind me of mum, or trigger memories,” says Grey. “But it’s equally been about painting parts of this place that have been a big part in healing or have nurtured me through this process of grieving.”

The exhibition reflects on the evolution of Grey’s practice, a deeper delving into abstraction, where the signifiers of place appear in colour and tone. A practice solidified in her 2024 win of the landscape-based Hadley’s Art Prize, but one that also touches on the fragility and tenderness of life so entwined with an artist’s environment.

Alongside sixteen abstract paintings, the artist has created eight smaller text-based works with little drawings that come from her memories; expressed as ‘flags.’ Made on unstretched linen, they are naive and experimental, appearing for the first time in Grey’s oeuvre – a direct link to her reckoning and processing. Phrases such as “visit me in my dreams . . . please” quietly touch on her grief and a wish for what’s lost.

Out Of The Blue is a reflective exhibition – one that invites a close connection with the landscape and places that hold memory. It’s a deeply personal collection of paintings; however, it taps into the wider human psyche and turns the intangible into something physical.

26 August to 19 September 2026

Joshua Andree
If My Wings Should Fail Me

In a shift from long drives to short walls, If My Wings Should Fail Me by Joshua Andree draws on his immediate surroundings, looking over the River Derwent and a sky in constant motion. The title is inspired by a line from a gospel-blues song (and later Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin); “If my wings should fail me, Lord, meet me in the middle with another pair.”

Andree explains, “It’s this idea that if you do get caught short, then there’s always going to be something to lift you up, and for me, that’s the landscape that I live in . . . if we look to the beauty in the landscape for hope, restoration, and repair, there can be good messages to be found.”

To evoke the sense of time, Andree fragments colour and style for transient moments, where the artworks are geometrically divided, floating from realism – the landscape delicately translated to canvas – to abstraction, where colour planes highlight the beautiful pinks and mauves that streak the sky for a minute or two.

Looking at Andree’s paintings, it’s easy to see the inspiration from nineteenth-century artists like Monet or Turner who captured not only the landscape but the shifting attitudes of the times. But he also cites Rothko, who created breathing space for the viewers to project into. “I’m providing a space where it’s not necessarily prescriptive, you know you are looking at a landscape, but I want you to be able to put yourself in the landscape,” says Andree.

Though an exhibition about landscapes, If My Wings Should Fail Me instead turns to the sense of spending time in the landscape. Whether it’s home, or somewhere spectacular like Cradle Mountain, there’s always a chance to find hope and repair.

23 September to 17 October 2026

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

 

Despard Gallery
Tasmania

Originally published in print – Art Almanac, September 2026 issue, pp. 38–44