SCAPE: Exhibition
SCAPE was Lander—Se’s first group exhibition, and it arrived with a particular energy. Twelve artists. All women. All connected to the Mornington Peninsula in some way — by birth, by choice, by the particular pull this place exerts on the people who make work here. The brief was landscape: literally, conceptually, spiritually, or figuratively. What came back was something far richer than a survey of local scenery.
The works moved between abstract painting and biomorphic sculpture, photography and wall-based ceramics, ink on fabric and plaster on recycled paper. What held them together was less a shared aesthetic than a shared attentiveness — to place, to material, to the way environment shapes the conditions of making.
Several artists spoke directly to the Peninsula as physical memory. Amy Leeworthy, who grew up in Red Hill and Main Ridge, described the sensation of playing in the iconic red clay as one of her earliest memories — wondering, still, whether that tactile childhood experience is what gives clay such a hold over her adult practice. For this exhibition she worked with mid-fire clays incorporating local granite and beeswax, referencing forms both familiar and imagined. Bri Horne’s film photography captured a single unguarded moment at Waurn Marrin, where she had been swimming in the cold bay water each morning — a roll of film, one shot left, a sky suddenly consumed by a hundred sulphur-crested cockatoos. She pressed the shutter without focusing. The resulting image is exactly what presence feels like.
Emma Shepherd, weaving from her Flinders studio using yarns collected from around the world alongside pine needles, horsehair and bark gathered from her immediate surrounds, put it plainly: she couldn’t make the work she makes without living where she lives. The landscape is inescapable, she said. In the best kind of way.
Charlotte Swiden’s paintings drew on the tension between her Scandinavian upbringing and her adopted home on the Peninsula — two coastlines, two cultures, the natural world as a bridge between them. Britt Neech, then working primarily in wall sculpture and ceramics, brought the intuitive process she has since refined further: shapes and compositions guided by experience, memory and the shifting light of the environment around her. Kelly Larkin’s pleated plaster sculptures recalled the cliff faces along the coastline at different times of day, the way salt air erodes rock into something both raw and refined.
Hannah Nowlan’s works for SCAPE drew on the specific history of the Red Hill property — once part of McIlroy’s Quarry, where slate was mined for local roads, later transformed into a spring-fed oasis. Walking the land, observing fragments of slate scattered across the paddocks, the works became a way of uncovering not just the site’s history but a personal geography. Each piece distilled the experience of listening to and knowing a particular piece of ground.
SCAPE opened across the first weekend of October 2024 with a Kerri Greens wine pop-up, welcoming the gallery’s first large public audience into the barn. The show ran through to December, giving the works time to settle into the space and into the consciousness of the people who came to see them.
Selected works from SCAPE remain available through the Lander—Se Stockroom. Contact art@landerse.au to enquire.
SCAPE — Group Exhibition
Emma Shepherd, Britt Neech, Tao Delves, Emma Labattaglia, Leyla Bulmer, Charlotte Swiden, Amy Leeworthy, Kelly Larkin, Sarah Austin, Hannah Nowlan, Natalie Bessell, Bri Horne
October 5 – December 22, 2024
Lander—Se, 585 Dunns Creek Road, Red Hill
