The respective works of Michele Burder, Susan Watson Knight and Amanda Johnson variously contain figurative and abstract elements, often with unconventional and/or high-key palettes. These values tend to be differently expressed by each artist, though all three share gravitational pulls to bold colour and to the use of citational strategies.
In the case of Johnson and Burder, representations of landscape/field/country are physically suffused by or overlaid with uncanny colour; in the case of Watson Knight and Burder, hard-edge figurative elements disappear in favour of blurred outlines that suggest illusion and speed, the ephemeral nature of perception. The careful distillation of such influences can be seen over the numerous visual iterations and exhibitions held by each artist since they first studied art together at RMIT in the early 1990s. Echoing cultural pasts remains a crucial part of each artist’s process, but the works here ultimately speak directly to the present.
Michele Burder’s paintings explore views from roads as seen through bus or car windows, as well as those captured on walks through public parks and local reserves. They reflect on the transience of nature, meditating on movement and stillness, celebrating the temporal and constructed nature of these landscapes. Genres of landscape as well as the literal photographed ‘field’ are a starting point for Burder’s dynamic gestures in paint. These emphasise reverberations of movement, Richteresque blurs. The paintings play with distortion, subtle colour schemes and echoing forms. The resulting obscuring of the scene or field is a way for the painter to allude to memory and passage through urbanised space.
In Susan Watson Knight’s recent work, traditional quilting shapes have provided the starting point for the development of high-coloured pigment prints (as echoes from the past). Familiar geometric shapes such as the polygon and the rhombus are scaled up and their edges blurred as Watson Knight conflates traditional oil painting and digital technologies. These images pay particular homage to anonymous Amish quilters from the early 1900s with their vibrant modernist approach to colour and design. Pigment prints variously evolve through ongoing experimentation with shape and colour and exaggerated blurring techniques. This renders pictorial outcomes kinetic, as shapes across the picture plane appear to move and expand in interesting ways.
Amanda Johnson works directly with echoes of colonial landscape genres and site-specific observation of degraded ‘wilderness’ areas. In the resulting temporal mashups, the painter uses toxic colour to manipulate generic landscape atmosphere. While sunset views traditionally suggest time passing and lyrical escape, Johnson’s DayGlo ‘fields’ elicit mourning and disquiet; invasive weeds insinuate foreground, middleground and background and remnant stands of giant eucalypts frame depleted vistas. In the studio, historical landscape sources recede as the artist maps changes to vegetation profiles and species diversity. The artist’s most recent depictions of botanical infestations and logging aftermath arise from field trips to the Otway State Forest, Tarkine and Florentine Valley.
Image 1: ‘B I R D S O N G S E V E N’, Susan Watson Knight, 2021, 85×113.5cm
Image 2: ‘C134 Mount Duneed, Late Afternoon’, Michele Burder, 2025. oil on canvas, 53×53 cm
Image 3: ‘Epicormic_Elegy Takyana’, Amanda Johnson, oil and acrylic, 170 x 190 cm
Image 4: ‘Remnant Yellow, Takayna Elegy’, Amanda Johnson, oil and acrylic, 130 x 90 cm
Image 5: ‘Bedazzle’, Susan Watson Knight, 2024, archival pigment print, 103 cm x 91 cm
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