With attentive connection to place

Michael Reid Sydney is delighted to present the latest solo exhibition by Eora/Sydney artist Julz Beresford – one of the defining interpreters of the Australian landscape working today and a singular talent whose immersive and atmospheric paintings have established her as one of the most in-demand artists represented in our gallery’s stable. Beresford’s new body of work, With attentive connection to place, brings together the two subjects most indelibly etched in her creative psyche: the romantic, brooding waterways and bushland surrounds of the Hawkesbury River and the majestic ranges of the Snowy Monaro.

In a rare coalescence of the two distinct and enduring subjects that have loomed large in her work, With attentive connection to place draws her Hawkesbury paintings into conversation with her Snowy Monaro mountainscapes, revealing the fullest picture yet of the artist’s creative world and the painterly preoccupations that propel her practice.

“Connection to the experience of place is what I’m interested in capturing,” says Beresford, who begins with gouache and watercolour sketches completed along the hiking trails of the Snowy Monaro region or while cruising the Hawkesbury on her boat, surrounded by the bushland of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park near her home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. “By returning to the same landscape in different seasons, at different times of the day and in all weather, it allows me to feel the physicality of place: the wind in my hair, the rain on my face, the warmth of a sheltered nook and the fierceness of weather I want to shelter from.”

Back in the studio, Beresford draws on her sketches to channel her elemental encounters with an immediacy and expressive energy that preserves the feeling of being there. Building, sculpting and carving out successive layers of thickly applied paint, she conjures sweeping nature scenes where light glints on wind-ruffled water, tangled eucalypts dissolve into ethereal wisps and alpine pathways weave through rugged topography.

“My work is both an expressive piece of the whole process and an embodiment of how it feels to be there,” says Beresford. “A journey on and into the landscape becomes a starting point which evolves into an artwork that tells the story and emotions of my mind.”

Monumental in ambition, physicality and heft, yet attentive to finer sensory details and small moments of tonal and textural lushness, Beresford’s works at once capture the landscape’s epic poetry while distilling a deeply personal experience of moving through it.

For enquiries, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au