Oscillating between Melbourne, Sydney, and Regional Australia - Melbourne born artist Stephanie Eather examines the medium as an extension of the body to recall and recompose lived experiences onto the planar. Her paintings and drawings are representative of a ritualistic process of observing, memorising, and re-imagining. Her vivid, gestural, and capricious works archive remnants of places that echo immaterialities that sit between memory, dream, and imagination.

Eather’s process begins as a wayfarer. A mobile archive of research and drawing, initiated with the aim of connecting to her family history. North East Victoria and regional New South Wales served as initial landmarks as she sourced and handcrafted charcoal onsite from local willow trees, integrating the medium into the ground of her drawings. In the years that followed, her practice was profoundly impacted when she embarked on an unplanned four-month woolshed-hop with her swag across the Riverina during the Covid-19 pandemic. The memory of this evocative experience became the anchor for further investigation through painting.

In the studio, Eather’s paintings articulate these reimagined environments using fervent oil-paint marks where a deep excavation of her unconscious is materialised through the medium. Her paintings are wild, colourful, lyrical and dynamic, skirting the tense edge between total abstraction and representation. Recycled merino wool as a ground for the planar - an ingenious decision - is imbued with the footprint of the places in which she has travelled. Fleece fibres, much like the willow tree, are tactile traces to origins of an unfolding memory that is searched for on the picture plane; the energy of the shearer's quarters, the knitting of a relatives garment, the nostalgia of a warm yet scratching blanket. Every mark; every material is an act of embodying their memory. The surface quality of the fleece, the willow charcoal, and the soil that is embedded in her paint - all serve as access points; an ode to the subject of the memory. This interlacing of body, memory, and medium—threading the immaterial, autobiographical memory with the physical—imbues Eather’s work with a remarkable affective quality, making us complicit in the re-imagination of these places.

In 2025, Stephanie Eather was showcased in the group show Tender Memories following her debut solo exhibition West of Kiewa in 2021 and her second solo exhibition From Vernon Terrace with Nanda\Hobbs in Sydney in 2024. Eathers work has garnered prizes and accolades that include being awarded the Bonner and Tonkin Drawing Award in 2023, runner up for the Vincent Prize in 2024 as well as being a selected as a finalist for prizes such as the Dobell Drawing Prize #21 and #22. Eather has completed a Master of Fine Art (Drawing) in 2023 at the National Art School, a Graduate Certificate in Art History from the University of Melbourne in 2013, and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Drawing) obtained from RMIT in 2009.

Sophie Horne