Thicker Than Water: Group Show

Other artists approach this inheritance through abstraction. “Monologue Black 23” (2008) by Callum Innes offers us a restrained tonal field. Layers are applied, altered, removed. What appears to be a quiet negotiation of surface becomes an examination of what remains and what disappears. The image is built through accumulation and erasure. What we see is inseparable from what has been. Brett McMahon’s “Nightflower 2” (2026) is dense with physical presence. The landscape forms us. Even now, when so much of contemporary life is detached from the physical world, these connections persist.

Stephanie Eather recalls the familiar details of domestic life – the backyard, grass, hills-hoist, trampoline – only to be displaced by their present forms: sandstone, hedges, the evidence of another stage of existence. Inhabited for forty years and altered through successive acts of renovation and care, her family home becomes both archive and palimpsest. In “Hot golden grains and salty sea air” (2026) she reimagines the undulating sands at the family boatshed: breakfasts on the beach, paddling a surf-ski across glassy water beneath an overcast sky. In remembering the landscape of her family holiday, she attempts to understand how place persists within us after it has materially changed. What remains when a place is altered beyond recognition? Does memory reside in the architecture itself or in the body that remembers it?

Julian Meagher’s “The Space out of Cuttagee” (2026) belongs to a kind of contemporary Neo-Romanticism. He looks to the natural world to ground himself in love for his family, and in a sense of spirituality. Meagher meditates on what it means to be alive, and on the profound connections that bind us to this place. The landscape becomes a vessel for his emotion: the sea melancholic, the sky hopeful, the horizon infinite. There is something profoundly pathétique in this transformation of nature into feeling; the painting is charged with the emotional weight of being.

Turning further inwards still, Mike Parr’s relentless engagement with the self-portrait is less concerned with likeness than with what lies beneath it: the unstable, fragmented and often unknowable self. In “Punctum & Friend [G & M]” (2008), drypoint is used to physically excavate the copper plate, the needle cutting into its surface to raise a burr that holds the black ink. The resulting line is forced into existence; it carries the pressure and resistance of the artist’s hand. The image is repeatedly drawn, copied, redrawn, etched, degraded and displaced until the original likeness begins to disappear. What remains is something more elemental – the trace of a person rather than their representation. Parr has described this process in terms of excavation, as though the image were already embedded within the material, ready to be unearthed through repeated trauma to the surface. The final result carries the evidence of everything that has come before.

Art is an act of survival. The responsibility of the artist is to decide what to preserve, what to question, and what to allow to disappear – to look backwards without being nostalgic, and engage with history without allowing it to be forgotten; an antidote to cultural amnesia. The things we inherit gather meaning as they pass through us, becoming more deeply our own. Perhaps what is thicker than water is not blood at all, but the residue of what survives this passage between generations – the strange density of things that refuse to disappear.