Here, Still

Paula Bowers

Exhibition Dates:
Friday 4 September – Sunday 27 September, 2026
Mon – Fri: 10.00am – 4.00pm
Sat – Sun: 10.00am – 3.00pm

Opening Night:
Thursday 3 September
5:30pm – 7:30pm

Here, Still — paintings of an amphitheatre of peaks and hills, painted from a personal space of observation and intuition.

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Artist Statement

Each morning on contemplative walks near my home in New Town, Hobart, I am held within a distinct amphitheatre of peaks and hills — kunanyi/Mount Wellington, Mount Stuart, Knocklofty, the Queens Domain, and the Meehan Range. Together they form a constant, beautiful presence around me, each one observed daily and absorbed, gradually, into my inner being.

These walks have become paintings of connection, beginning with grounds of deep orange or red gold — an underpainting that recalls a place lit by first light. Further layers of differing colour are then built across the canvas, with the warmth remaining visible, just beneath the surface.

I work intuitively rather than descriptively — a register closer to feeling than to likeness. The result is a series of paintings focused on presence: the sensation of encountering something complex yet effortless — vast, gentle, knowing, and enduring…and being, if only briefly, steadied by its beauty.

Here, Still is an act of sustained looking — a landscape I return to again and again, one that offers no urgency, only constancy, and in that constancy, a restorative form of wellbeing.