Whitney Bedford, Fiona Pompey, and Lucia Sidonio, are three painters whose practices converge in their exploration of ambiguous space, emotional timbre, and the performative act of mark-making. Their work shares a sensibility that treats surface not merely as a flat support for paint, but as a site of tension between presence and absence, gesture and silence.

Los Angeles-based Whitney Bedford is known for her ink and oil paintings that reimagine historical genres like marine painting, romantic ruins, and botanical illustration, through a contemporary lens. Her work often depicts imagined landscapes rendered with fluid linework and gestural overlays that destabilise the image.

South Australian artist Fiona Pompey engages with the desert landscape through her indigenous Australian heritage, treating it as a mnemonic and emotional terrain. Forms are obscured and revealed through a taut meniscus of rhythmic fluid patterns that reference Aboriginal visual traditions.

Lucia Sidonio, based in Christchurch, works with painting as a psychological, performative and relational medium. Her paintings are soft, fictive scrims through which can be seen collective and individual moments of human connection and intimacy, caught in mid-performance. The works entice the viewer to feel like a participant.

Together, these artists construct spaces that resist fixed geography or narrative. Their paintings are performatively allusive and suggestive rather than descriptive, staging moments of tension, transition, and emotional ambiguity.

(Text by Andrew Paul Wood)