Artist Statement

My work explores light, colour and texture, creating landscapes that sit between recognition and abstraction. Drawing on Australia's ancient landscapes, my paintings evoke something both deeply familiar and quietly surreal.

Working in acrylic mixed with earth, clay and ochre, I build surfaces through layering, blending and gestural marks, forms emerging and dissolving across the canvas. Textured areas create depth and movement, letting the landscape shift between what I know and something imagined. The work reflects the way memory holds onto fragments of a place, while details blur and alter over time.

Each landscape becomes an impression, shaped by memory, colour and feeling, offering an experiential encounter with place: something felt as much as seen.

Bio

Tara is a Sydney-based painter and photographer whose work explores memory and perception through deeply textured, layered and dreamlike landscapes grounded in Australia's ancient vistas.

She began her career as a photojournalist for News Ltd publications in Sydney, freelancing across South East Asia before studying a Visual Arts degree at Curtin University and completing a Graduate Diploma of Visual Art Education at ACU.

Drawing on a heightened sensory perception shaped by her personal journey through illness, Tara's work centres on light, colour and texture. She creates large, layered compositions that build depth and dimension, blending and distorting form to reveal the environment in fresh, unexpected ways.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries across Sydney and Melbourne, including Brunswick Street Gallery, Tiliqua Tiliqua Gallery and Stirrup Gallery, and she has completed several art residencies, including the Broken Hill Art Residency. She was invited by the Art Gallery of NSW to give an artist talk as part of their Sensory Friendly evenings, and has been a finalist in several Australian art awards, including the National Art Prize and the Art and About Australian Life exhibition.