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colour.field.echo
Michele Burder, Susan Watson Knight & Amanda Johnson
colour.field.echo
5 August – 30 August 2025
hours:
Tuesday – Friday: 12pm – 7pm
Saturdays: 12pm – 4pm
admission: Free
…echoing cultural pasts remains a crucial part of each artist’s process, but the works here ultimately speak directly to the present…
The respective works of Michele Burder, Susan Watson Knight and Amanda Johnson variously contain figurative and abstract elements, often with unconventional and/or high-key palettes. These values tend to be differently expressed by each artist, though all three share gravitational pulls to bold colour and to the use of citational strategies.
In the case of Johnson and Burder, representations of landscape/field/country are physically suffused by or overlaid with uncanny colour; in the case of Watson Knight and Burder, hard-edge figurative elements disappear in favour of blurred outlines that suggest illusion and speed, the ephemeral nature of perception. The careful distillation of such influences can be seen over the numerous visual iterations and exhibitions held by each artist since they first studied art together at RMIT in the early 1990s. Echoing cultural pasts remains a crucial part of each artist’s process, but the works here ultimately speak directly to the present.
Michele Burder’s paintings explore views from roads as seen through bus or car windows, as well as those captured on walks through public parks and local reserves. They reflect on the transience of nature, meditating on movement and stillness, celebrating the temporal and constructed nature of these landscapes. Genres of landscape as well as the literal photographed ‘field’ are a starting point for Burder’s dynamic gestures in paint. These emphasise reverberations of movement, Richteresque blurs. The paintings play with distortion, subtle colour schemes and echoing forms. The resulting obscuring of the scene or field is a way for the painter to allude to memory and passage through urbanised space.
In Susan Watson Knight’s recent work, traditional quilting shapes have provided the starting point for the development of high-coloured pigment prints (as echoes from the past). Familiar geometric shapes such as the polygon and the rhombus are scaled up and their edges blurred as Watson Knight conflates traditional oil painting and digital technologies. These images pay particular homage to anonymous Amish quilters from the early 1900s with their vibrant modernist approach to colour and design. Pigment prints variously evolve through ongoing experimentation with shape and colour and exaggerated blurring techniques. This renders pictorial outcomes kinetic, as shapes across the picture plane appear to move and expand in interesting ways.
Amanda Johnson works directly with echoes of colonial landscape genres and site-specific observation of degraded ‘wilderness’ areas. In the resulting temporal mashups, the painter uses toxic colour to manipulate generic landscape atmosphere. While sunset views traditionally suggest time passing and lyrical escape, Johnson’s DayGlo ‘fields’ elicit mourning and disquiet; invasive weeds insinuate foreground, middleground and background and remnant stands of giant eucalypts frame depleted vistas. In the studio, historical landscape sources recede as the artist maps changes to vegetation profiles and species diversity. The artist’s most recent depictions of botanical infestations and logging aftermath arise from field trips to the Otway State Forest, Tarkine and Florentine Valley.
Michele Burder
Michele Burder’s paintings explore views from roads as seen through bus or car windows, as well as those captured on walks through public parks and local reserves. They reflect on the transience of nature, meditating on movement and stillness, celebrating the temporal and constructed nature of these landscapes. Genres of landscape as well as the literal photographed ‘field’ is a starting point for Burder’s dynamic gestures in paint. These emphasise reverberations of movement, Richteresque blurs. The paintings play with distortion, subtle colour schemes and echoing forms. The resulting obscuring of the scene or field is a way for the painter to allude to memory and passage through urbanised space.
Michele Burder is a painter based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She completed a Fine Arts Honours degree and Master of Arts (Painting) at RMIT. Since 1990 she has shown regularly in solo and group exhibitions. In 2005 she was an Artist in Residence at the Arthur Boyd Trust, Bundanon. Her work has been shortlisted for the Robert Jacks Drawing Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery.
Susan Watson Knight
Susan Watson Knight’s geometric images fuse painting, photography and digital printing technologies in an ongoing experimentation with the polygon, rhombus and other traditional quilting shapes. Warm and cool, complimentary and simultaneous contrasts of colour assist the artist’s continuing investigation of complex relationships between colour and shape. The edges of her forms and colour fields are softened and blurred to some extent and in the more exaggerated renderings these shapes pulsate and quiver. Many of the dazzling colour choices are inspired by the surrounding landscape and the birdlife and foliage outside her studio. The colour palette from the Birdsong Series directly echoes the brilliant plumage of the Crimson Rosellas and King Parrots, whereas other compositions are more directly influenced by the artists interest in Amish quilts designed and completed in the early part of the 20th Century.
Susan Watson Knight is a visual artist living and working on the outskirts of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. After studying Arts and Education at La Trobe University she completed a Fine Arts Degree and Honours Year at RMIT. Her work was recently shortlisted and exhibited in the 2024 Biennale of Colour and Light and the 2025 Omnia Art Prize.
Amanda Johnson
Amanda Johnson typically retraces locations where optimistic views of early colonial landscape painting were made. Paintings mimic nineteenth-century landscape silhouettes, but heightened colour, alongside the foregrounding of invasives and stunted epicormic growth invites reconsideration of the landscape view; are these paintings images of beauty, erasure or threat? The resulting temporal, cultural ‘mashups’ remind us that the colonial past is not remote, but part of a colonial present in which ecological violence goes unchecked.
Amanda lives and works on Gadabanud Country at Cape Otway and in Naarm/Melbourne. Her paintings were recently shortlisted in the Hadley’s Art Prize (2024, 2023, 2021, 2019), the 2024 Len Fox Art Prize and the 2024 John Leslie Landscape Prize. Her recent solo show, Stranglehold, Colonial Heat was held at fortyfive downstairs in 2024, continuing the artist’s long-term exploration of landscape, country and toxicity. Since graduating from a Master’s degree at Victorian College of the Arts in 1995, she has been the recipient of Asialink and Arthur Boyd Bundanon painting residencies.
Opening Night
Tuesday 5 August, 5-7pm
Artist Talk
Saturday 16 August, 2pm