Life Had Me

George Kennedy, Leigh Rigozzi, Max Mueller, Lucinda Bresnehan, and Esther Touber

Exhibition Dates:
Thursday 2 – Monday 13 April, 2026
Open 10:00am – 5:00pm daily

Closing Event:
Friday 10 April
5:30pm – 7:30pm

The artists included within the exhibition share something in common: their affinity for the natural world and a drive to portray unique connections and fascinations through their artworks. The artists work within painting; despite working within the same medium, the artists respond to the theme of nature in diverse ways.

“We are not separate from this Earth; we are part of it, whether we fully feel it in our bodies yet or not.” If Women Rose Rooted, Sharon Blackie.

The odd becomes the norm in Leigh Rigozzi’s multifaceted work. An intersection of Pieter Bruegel with art comics results in the comical and cryptic work of Rigozzi. Rigozzi’s landscapes use symbolism and narrative to create busy, fantastical scenes that reimagine the works of Bruegel and help him to process his ambivalence toward the modern world. His colourful and chaotic paintings teeter between optimism and despair, keeping the eye busy on these ever-changing worlds. 

Within this exhibition Esther Touber includes three varied series of paintings that all follow the theme of nature; for Touber, depicting nature as readily comprehensible holds little interest. Touber is focused on layering ambiguous marks to represent the layers of life. These marks are open to be interpreted, but Touber generally perceives them as stars, suns, striations (lines in rocks), snowflakes, scratches on whales, water ripples, and clouds. 

Touber is drawn to repetitive mark and image-making, holding Georgia O’Keeffe’s series of 20-22 paintings of her courtyard door as inspiration, as Touber is struck by the obsessiveness that shows a love of the marks of the everyday that she can relate to. 

Touber has included a series of 9 paintings of water goddess-like figures, who take on the forms of half female/half sea creatures. These figures are painted in a naive-style to involve a folkloric element. These works are not to represent anything particularly comprehensible but to capture a devotion–a call to idolise the sea and all that it holds.

Lucinda Bresnehan paintings focus on the creeks and rivulets of Hobart, these waterways—often hidden or overlooked—act as arteries of identity, winding through both our urban environment and our internal lives. I explore the fluid connection between the human psyche and the natural world across the transition of day and night. 

By capturing the essence of light and nocturnal mood of these terrains, Bresnahan’s work dissolves the boundaries between the self and the moving water. These paintings remind us that we are inextricably intertwined with these places; we cannot be separated from nature.

There’s a quiet vibrancy in the paintings of Max Mueller. His landscapes are secluded, focused on the simplicity of wildlife scenes. Despite the teetering sense of loneliness, the palette is warm, surfacing a sense of nostalgia. Nostalgia is exactly what Mueller paints to represent, alongside a tenderness of a past landscape and his memories attached to it. Mueller paints childhood images of places he once visited and grew connected to. Mueller describes capturing “lingering feelings” within his expressionistic works. 

Through multi-layered and vibrant paintings George Kennedy investigates the clash between nature and human-made objects and spaces. Kennedy finds inspiration for his work by walking around and sketching the bushland in Rokeby where expansive urbanisation rapidly encroaches on natural spaces. During his walks Kennedy often encounters burnt out cars and other rusting and rotting human-made objects; Kennedy uses extensive layering to represent the layers of life that have been haphazardly gathered together. While there is chaos within the fracturing lines of the heaps of spoiling objects, imagery of capitalism finds itself comfortable in these landscapes of Rokeby.