Event Type: Artist Talk

Opening Event :
Friday 8 August 2025, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Includes an introduction by the artists, followed by a short dialogue between the artistic and scientific perspectives of aurora photography. This conversation will explore how visual art can reveal scientific phenomena in ways that create emotional connection and deeper understanding.

Exhibition Dates :
Friday 8 – Monday 18 August 2025
Sunday – Friday 10:00am – 5:00pm
Saturdays 9:00am – 5:00pm

A contemplative visual collaboration between art and science showcasing Tasmania’s unique connection to the southern lights, where award-winning photography reveals the awe-inspiring beauty of this natural phenomenon during the 2025 solar maximum.

Featuring works by Dr Andrew Phipps, Luke Tscharke, Paul Hoelen, and Benjamin Alldridge

A powerful photographic journey revealing Tasmania’s unique connection to the southern lights. During the 2025 solar maximum, this exhibition showcases award-winning photography that captures one of nature’s most elusive phenomena, the aurora australis, as it illuminates Tasmania’s night skies. The collection celebrates our island’s position as Australia’s best aurora viewing location, presenting the southern lights as both an artistic subject with remarkable visual impact and a scientific phenomenon demonstrating interactions between solar activity and Earth’s atmosphere.

Each photograph is paired with accessible scientific insights into the processes creating these auroral forms, offering understanding of space weather, solar activity and atmospheric interactions. Interactive elements include a live aurora dashboard displaying real-time solar conditions, time-lapse presentations revealing aurora movement patterns, and educational material highlighting Tasmania’s pristine dark skies and ideal viewing conditions.

Presented as part of National Science Week 2025 with support from Inspiring Tasmania, Dark Sky Tasmania, and Beaker Street, this exhibition brings together artistic vision and scientific understanding during Solar Cycle 25’s peak. Southern Nights explores how looking south across Tasmania’s dramatic landscapes reveals these magnificent nocturnal displays that have captivated sky-watchers for generations.

Opening Event :
Friday 11 October 2024, 6:00pm – 7:30pm

Exhibition Dates :
Saturday 12 – Saturday 26 October 2024
10:00am – 4:00pm daily

Opening Event :
Friday 11 October 2024, 6:00pm – 7:30pm

Artist Talk :
Sunday 13 October 2024 @ 2pm

To light up or illuminate; well-lit

This dictionary definition is a repeating theme behind this collection of latest works. The title of “Luminous State” is a duality and can refer to both a literal geographical location, such as in this case, the state of Tasmania, and a condition of the mind.

“Over the years I’ve researched and examined many of Tasmania’s remote and rugged landscapes. This group
of works which has formed the “Luminous State” exhibition, is a collaboration of these sojourns and a
memory filled revisiting of this visual and emotive discovery.

Despite the variety in locations represented, the one repeating factor in this exhibition is the quality and
transient nature of Tasmania’s light and my ability in harnessing this light quality in paint. Tasmania’s light is recognised across the nation as having a clarity and warmth that bathes it subjects. Particularly at certain times of the year as the sun tracks a low trajectory across the sky.

The illumination of this direct light through clear alpine air or filtered light through a heavy atmosphere, provides an unending and ambient form of communication to the viewer. Recording these moments literally in the field by means of plein air studies, sketches and photographs has provided me with the means back in the studio of giving to the viewer of my work the same emotive response I experienced when on location.

If the viewer can feel the bite of a southerly breeze or the desperate warmth of alpine sun late in the day emanating from these paintings, then my work has found its purpose.”
– Clifford How