Internal terrains _{by Isabella Smith}

The group show Common Ground, on display at Twentysix Gallery until the 18^th of April, deals with geographic and internal terrains at the junction where material meets memory. Curator Petra Scheuber brought artists Amber Hearn, James Watkins, and Kirstie Ussher together for their “shared sensitivity to abstraction, colour, and strong material engagement with paint itself”. There is a shared patience in how they build, layer, and resolve a surface.

Watkins tells me his works “are made up of fragments of different places, memories, and moments”. Occasionally he’ll use a photograph to ground a certain element of the image, but more often than not, he’ll pull the shapes from memory, utilising his subconscious as a resource “full of the forms and shapes of landmasses, mountains, plants, or islands”.

Having spent her formative years in Papua New Guinea and now working in the Blue Mountains in Australia, Hearn’s practice carries a sensitivity to place. “The paintings sit within a kind of internal, architectural landscape, somewhere between memory, body, and place.” She tells me they are “forms that can read as both bodies and spaces, containers for memory and lived experience. They shift between object and opening, presence and absence, sometimes feeling like abstracted self-portraits.”

Ussher allows time to reveal a painting through layering, sanding back, and scraping. She says, “I’m drawn to materials and techniques that hold a sense of history, allowing marks, textures, and subtle shifts to accumulate rather than working toward a fixed outcome.” Her interest comes “from a lingering nostalgia” and a “fascination with impermanence, how things change, fade, and soften.”

Looking at the works, you instantly intuit that, though distinct, they are speaking to one another on a different, shared plane, peeling back the folds of a different mode of time.