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

kunanyi/Mount Wellington presides over Hobart with quiet, unhurried authority. A presence that shifts by the hour yet remains, at its core, unmistakably itself. In Here, Still I turn my attention to this mountain not as subject but as companion: a fixture of daily life since my move from Sydney four years ago – observed on countless walks and absorbed gradually into the language of my practice.

The paintings are built through successive layers, beginning with grounds of deep orange and red gold – an underpainting that recalls the mountain lit by first light. As further layers are worked across the canvas, this warmth is never entirely suppressed. It surfaces in fragments – an ember beneath ash, suggesting a geological memory embedded in the paint itself.

I work intuitively rather than descriptively. My brushwork is fluid yet considered – a register closer to feeling than to likeness. The result is a body of work less concerned with terrain than with presence: the sensation of standing before something vast, ancient and enduring…and being, if only briefly, steadied by it.

Here, Still is an act of sustained looking. It asks what it means to return, again and again to a landscape that offers no urgency, only constancy – and to find, in that constancy, a restorative form of wellbeing.