SLATE: Exhibition
SLATE: The Exhibition That Started Everything
Every gallery has an origin story. Lander—Se’s began with a swag, an outhouse, and a steel barn that had been sitting abandoned on two and a half acres in Red Hill.
In 2021, Tim Berger and I purchased the acreage with a clear intention: to build something that didn’t yet exist on the Mornington Peninsula. Not just a gallery, but a space that was genuinely of the land it sat on — rural, artist-run, and committed to the kind of contemporary art that takes landscape seriously. What we hadn’t fully anticipated was how long the building would take, or how completely it would consume us. For two years we drove down most weekends, living onsite with a camping shower and little else, plastering the soaring walls ourselves, sourcing salvaged stone from skip bins for the bench tops, installing the handmade double-glazed doors that now frame the paddocks beyond.
The renovation was its own kind of sabbatical. I stepped away from painting almost entirely.
When I finally returned to the studio, the land itself had been sharing itself slowly with in. Walking the property during those two years, I’d been learning things I hadn’t known to look for. Neighbours shared histories. The ground gave up hints, clues and gems. The site had once been part of McIlroy’s Quarry, where slate was mined for local roads, before transforming into a spring-fed oasis, water rising from underground aquifers filled the quarry with thirty-metres of water. Fragments of slate were scattered across the land everywhere we looked.
SLATE, the inaugural exhibition of Lander—Se, was the direct result of that two-year listening. Eighteen site-specific paintings sharing what the land had told me about its history, its water, its particular quality of stillness. The works were fluid, layered, and deliberately fragile-feeling, delicate strokes that acknowledged how much remained unknowable even after years of close attention. Mythology and selfhood have always run through my practice, and here they found a specific address.
More than two hundred people came through the opening weekend in April 2024. I hadn’t fully anticipated what that would feel like, to show work in a space that Tim and I had built with our own hands, in a room that felt as much like a work of art as anything hanging in it. A piece of advice I’d received years earlier from Lucy Feagins, owner of The Design Files, had quietly guided the whole project: think about where you want to be in five years, and start saying yes to projects that lead you there. SLATE was our first exhibition at Lander—Se, a gallery we had forged and where five years of saying yes had brought me.
Works from SLATE are held in private collections across Australia. To enquire about Hannah Nowlan’s available works, visit the Lander—Se Stockroom or contact art@landerse.au
SLATE — Hannah Nowlan
April 27 – June 10, 2024
Lander—Se, 585 Dunns Creek Road, Red Hill
