Lives and works BETWEEN Sydney AND MELBOURNE

Oscillating between Melbourne, Sydney, and Regional Australia, Melbourne-born artist Stephanie Eather examines painting and drawing as extensions of the body—ways to recall and recompose lived experience onto the planar. Her vivid, gestural works emerge through a ritualistic process of observing, memorising, and reimagining, archiving fragments of places that sit between memory, dream, and imagination.

Eather’s practice began as a wayfarer, tracing her family history across North East Victoria and regional New South Wales. She sourced and handcrafted charcoal onsite from local willow trees, embedding material from place directly into her drawings. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she undertook an unplanned four-month woolshed-hop across the Riverina, an evocative journey that became a lasting anchor for her painting practice.

In the studio, her paintings articulate reimagined environments through fervent oil marks that excavate the unconscious. Recycled merino wool as ground imbues her canvases with tactile memory—echoing the energy of shearers’ quarters, the knitting of a garment, or the warmth of a childhood blanket. Willow charcoal, soil, and fleece fibres serve as access points to memory, weaving the immaterial with the physical. This interlacing of body, place, and medium imbues her work with a remarkable affective force, inviting us into the reimagination of landscape and memory.