Stone Country & Heartlands

Cameron Brooke & Warren Brooke

Exhibition Dates :
Friday 20 February – Sunday 1 March 2026
9:30am – 5:00pm daily 

Opening Event :
Friday 20 February 2026, 5:30pm – 7:30pm

A father and son in rare and electrifying dialogue: Stone Country channels raw, ancient energies of place; Heartlands commands light with masterful clarity. Two powerful bodies of work collide across lineage and landscape, offering a radical, luminous reimagining of how Australia—and art itself—can be felt, held, and seen.

Stone County – works by Cameron Brooke

I don’t paint what a landscape looks like.
I paint what it does to me.

Stone Country emerges from the charged edges of Tasmania and Arnhem Land— threshold landscapes where the world thins, where stone hums, where something ancient presses close. These are ecological and energetic crossroads that humans have gravitated toward across the ages. These are places I’ve lived in, worked to protect, and learned to move through with patience: walking, listening, tending, letting the land lead.
Years spent living simply in these places taught me that the land is a living intelligence, carrying old stories and unseen energies that move through the body long before they ever surface in paint.
My process begins in stillness: long, quiet time on country without making a mark, allowing the world to press close until instinct overtakes thought. The painting arrives later in the studio in a kind of storm—oils squeezed straight from the tube, dragged by hand, rag, weight, breath. No sketches. No safety net. Only surrender. The words, Trust the madness
has lived across my easels for years; it’s become the quiet engine behind everything I make, a reminder to step aside and let the land speak in its own force and rhythm.
As you enter this exhibition, come as you would to a sacred place—quiet, open, unguarded. Let these works meet you as the land met me: not as images, but as presence. As a living current. As something still speaking, still very much alive.

Heartlands – works by Warren Brooke

Heartlands brings together a lifetime of painting—works created across decades yet rarely seen until now. I first exhibited in Adelaide in the mid-1960s, alongside artists such as Sidney Nolan, Hans Heysen, Ainsley Roberts, and Ivor Hele. Even then, I felt compelled to follow my own path, and this exhibition reflects that long-standing instinct.
What sets these works apart is the way I use light. Light is not simply something that falls across the landscape; it is the medium itself. It is the vehicle through which my hand moves, the force that shapes each composition. I work until light, gesture, and story settle into harmony on the canvas. My approach is a conscious counterpoint to the directions
taken by much contemporary painting. Instead of fragmentation or spectacle, I pursue clarity—an intimacy between viewer, place, and moment.
These paintings draw on the deep traditions of the old masters, the Impressionists, and the great Australian painters who came before me. Yet they also seek something new: an expression that lies between impression and emotion, between memory and presence. If you find yourself held by these works—if you linger, if they stay with you, if you feel
something shift or settle inside—then the work has done its job. In that moment, I am released from it.
This is the Heartlands.