Inhale the Velvet Sky
Emma Sutherland
20 August–6 September

“Open the windows and let the night blow in. Inhale the velvet sky, alive and dancing with pinprick stars. The ancient damp red earth. These olfactory wonders sent to envelope us at this place in the universe. To remind us that we are- right here- expansive energy. That we are warm and safe and loved and held. That the open plains and warm winds, night skies are places we can rest.”

 – Diary entry by Emma Sutherland. On the road to Deniliquin, Sept 2025.

Emma Sutherland is an abstract painter living and working on Gadigal land in NSW. Her work explores the immaterial and expanding energy of the natural world, particularly the landscape. Her work is anchored in the sensory expression of this energy – how we experience places, seasons, climates in our body and senses.  

She paints things she cannot see but can feel viscerally – the texture and hum of the living world are registered in colours, mark-making, shapes and ethereal layers of polymer on her canvases. Paintings that are continuously made and unmade. Stripped back and painted over in translucent layers, like the internal mind revisiting the land, looking for memory and feeling.