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Michael Reid Southern Highlands

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Our latest gallery venture is situated in Berrima, in the rolling hills & verdant greens of the Southern Highlands, combining the visual sophistication of a major urban gallery with a more relaxed, arcadian inheritance.

30/08/2026

Concluding Today: Miranda Joy Summers, ‘Threshold’ | Ground Floor Gallery

Today is the final day to visit Miranda Joy Summers’ exhibition, ‘Threshold’, at Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

The exhibition returns the artist to Middle Harbour, the stretch of Sydney that has become a constant presence in her work. “It is the water that continually draws me back,” she says. “I’m captivated by its depth, its shifting colour, and the way it holds and transforms the world through reflection.”

By boat or from the shore, she returns to the same coves and inlets, watching the light change throughout the day. In the studio, those observations are gradually reduced and rearranged in oil. What interests her is the peculiar instability of the water—the point at which a reflected boat, tree, or sky is recognisable, and then, as the surface ripples, transforms into an abstracted composition.

“I found myself asking where these two realities meet, where the landscape ends and its reflection begins,” she says. “Does that place have a name? Does it occupy a physical space?”

This question forms the defining theme of ‘Threshold’: an exploration of boundaries and “the weightless line where one reality crosses into another,” brought to life through rich impasto painting.

Miranda Joy Summers

27/08/2026

ANNOUNCING: Joanne Sisson, ‘Unfurl: Gatherings and Collections’ | Ground Floor Gallery | Opening September 3

Commencing our spring program, we are delighted to announce Joanne Sisson’s return to Michael Reid Southern Highlands with ‘Unfurl: Gatherings and Collections’.

In Sisson’s paintings, delicate stems arc, loop and wander across the canvas, their restless movement held — though never contained — within crystal, vintage glass and humble vessels. The flowers appear perpetually on the verge of outgrowing their arrangements, caught somewhere between cultivation and wildness.

Sisson’s compositions occupy two interconnected worlds: the airy realm above the vessel, where stems reach outward and upward, and the submerged world below, where those same forms twist and coil through transparent glass. It is a space of doubling and reflection, where what is seen and what is hidden exist in conversation.

Working within the compressed pictorial space of the modernist still-life tradition, Sisson dispenses with deep perspective, locating her subjects within only the faintest suggestion of a tabletop, often established by little more than a subtle shift in tone against an otherwise uninterrupted field of colour. The celebrated, comparatively small series of still-life paintings John Brack completed in the 1950s comes to mind: their crisp edges, restrained backgrounds, and the precise visual tension between organic irregularity and geometric order.

Press through to the link in bio to register your interest in a preview catalogue.

Joanne Sisson

24/08/2026

CONTINUING: Elizabeth Beaumont, ‘Busy/Quiet’ | Top Floor Gallery

Elizabeth Beaumont’s paintings begin in the landscape, but rarely remain there in any straightforward sense. There is an instinct to accumulate that runs through her practice, from the reference books and field guides lining her studio to the layers of paint on the canvas. A line wanders, a colour deepens, an earlier passage surfaces again.

‘Busy/Quiet’ continues this week in-gallery and online via the link bio.

Elizabeth Beaumont

21/08/2026

Today, we congratulate Irene Crowe, whose solo collection ‘Prelude’ has been acquired in its entirety.

Having recently concluded at Michael Reid Murrurundi, ‘Prelude’ marked the arrival of a compelling new voice in landscape painting and abstraction.

Working from her light-filled studio in Eora/Sydney, Crowe captures the magnificent colour changes of late dusk: flashes of pink and orange that glimmer as the sun reaches its lowest point, giving particular form to billowing, feathery cloud formations.

The collection is an ode to a specific vantage point she has since left behind: a view of the sky from her old Sydney home that continued to resonate after she moved away.

Yet it is these skies, tied precisely to a particular place, that Crowe transposes onto landscapes far removed from the recognisable terrain of Sydney. Instead, they evoke the sweeping scale and drama of the Sublime, particularly the vast atmospheric paintings of J.M.W. Turner.

In October, the artist will present a new and limited body of paintings, before presenting a solo collection in our Northern Beaches gallery in 2027.

To register your interest in new work by Irene Crowe, follow the link in bio.

Michael Reid Murrurundi
Irene Crowe

18/08/2026

INTRODUCING: Julie Purdie, ‘Sightlines’

A finalist in the 2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, Eora/Sydney-based painter Julie Purdie joins Michael Reid with ‘Sightlines’, a body of work concerned with the ways we look, focus and perceive.

Purdie’s paintings begin with a simple premise: seeing is an act of continual selection. The eye edits as much as it observes, privileging one detail while allowing another to recede into the periphery.

It is an idea Purdie knows from two sides. Alongside her painting practice, she has spent more than two decades as a clinical optometrist, studying the mechanics of sight with the same sustained attention she brings to the landscape.

Across the works, translucent geometric forms interrupt fields, skies and ridgelines. Within these planes, subdued tones become unexpectedly luminous: a hillside takes on a honeyed warmth, while a pale sky acquires a new radiance beside a field of amber.

There are echoes here of hard-edge painting and, in particular, the investigations of Josef Albers, for whom the nested square became a means of exploring the instability of colour. But where Albers pursued these questions within geometric abstraction, Purdie finds them within the mutable conditions of the Australian landscape.

Beginning with digital and paper sketches made on site, Purdie develops these observations through long-exposure photography and camera movement before translating them into acrylic and oil paintings. Sgraffito, masking and layered applications of paint echo the successive stages through which visual information is gathered, filtered and resolved.

Works from ‘Sightlines’ can be viewed in-gallery and online via the link in our bio:

Julie Purdie

14/08/2026

NOW OPEN: ELIZABETH BEAUMONT | ‘Busy/Quiet’ | Top Floor Gallery | Until 13 September

Following her return to the Southern Highlands and a move into a new studio, Elizabeth Beaumont has found herself painting again in a landscape she first knew growing up. Her studio, an iron shed set among the undulating hills, looks out onto the country that has long informed her work.

Across the twelve paintings in ‘Busy/Quiet’, the warmth of summer, the deep greens and ochres of the bush, sudden flashes of blue, and the changing light that slips through the trees and across the hills are all brought to the fore. Beaumont paints with an instinctive physicality: broad sweeps of pigment, fine lines and layered surfaces build and dissolve, as though each painting is finding its way into focus.

Join us tomorrow, Saturday 15 August, to celebrate the opening of ‘Busy/Quiet’ at our reception from 2–4pm. To explore the collection, press through to the link in bio.

Elizabeth Beaumont | Busy/Quiet
Opening reception: Saturday, 15 August, 2–4pm
Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Elizabeth Beaumont

13/08/2026

YOU’RE INVITED: SUSAN MORRIS | ‘Looking for Leaves, Finding Flowers’ | Opening Reception Saturday, 15 August, 2–4pm | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Please join artist SUSAN MORRIS and the Michael Reid Southern Highlands team this Saturday, 15 August, for an afternoon reception to celebrate the opening of ‘Looking for Leaves, Finding Flowers’.

Morris has been painting for as long as she can remember. Her early training in graphic design, illustration and textile design gave her a particular sensitivity to pattern, colour and decoration, but it is in still life that she has found her subject: the sustained pleasure of looking closely.

For this collection, Morris has gathered much of her material from roadsides and railway lines, gardens and florists, becoming increasingly alert to what is growing around her and to the small, seasonal offerings that might otherwise go unnoticed. Banksias, flowering gums, eucalyptus and other Australian natives are brought indoors and arranged in vessels collected over time.

There is something wonderfully unhurried about the process. Morris paints from life, spending time finding the right vessel and arranging the branches before she begins.

We’d love you to join us from 2pm as we raise a glass with Elizabeth Beaumont, Miranda Joy Summers and Susan Morris to celebrate the opening of three new collections across the gallery.

OPENING RECEPTION
Susan Morris | Looking for Leaves, Finding Flowers
Saturday, 15 August, 2–4pm
Michael Reid Southern Highlands
11b Old Hume Highway
Berrima NSW 2577

Susan Morris

12/08/2026

YOU’RE INVITED: ELIZABETH BEAUMONT | ‘Busy/Quiet’ | Opening Reception Saturday, 15 August, 2–4pm | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Please join artist ELIZABETH BEAUMONT and the Michael Reid Southern Highlands team this Saturday, 15 August, for an afternoon reception to celebrate the opening of ‘Busy/Quiet’.

Beaumont’s studio is an iron shed nestled among the undulating hills of the Southern Highlands, the landscape she calls home. Inside, worn field guides, shelves of pigments, improvised palettes and canvases in various stages of becoming surround an artist whose practice is rooted in close observation and experimentation.

For Beaumont, the Australian bush is an enduring source of inspiration. Across the ten paintings that comprise ‘Busy/Quiet’, there is an unmistakable feeling of moving through it: brushing past flowering shrubs, breathing the scent of eucalyptus, stepping into shafts of light beneath the canopy.

We’d love you to join us from 2pm as we raise a glass with Elizabeth, Miranda Joy Summers and Susan Morris to celebrate the opening of three new collections across the gallery.

OPENING RECEPTION
Elizabeth Beaumont | Busy/Quiet
Saturday, 15 August, 2–4pm
Michael Reid Southern Highlands
11b Old Hume Highway
Berrima NSW 2577

Elizabeth Beaumont

11/08/2026

YOU’RE INVITED: MIRANDA JOY SUMMERS | ‘Threshold’ | Opening Reception Saturday, 15 August, 2–4pm | Michael Reid Southern Highlands

Please join artist MIRANDA JOY SUMMERS and the Michael Reid Southern Highlands team this Saturday, 15 August, for an afternoon reception to celebrate the opening of ‘Threshold’, Summers’ third solo collection with Michael Reid.

Returning to the Middle Harbour inlet that has become a constant source of inspiration, Summers’ new paintings dwell on its particular confluence of water, bushland, rock and moored boats, rendered in richly worked oil paint.

Miranda will be joined by Elizabeth Beaumont and Susan Morris, who will also be celebrating the launch of their new collections in the Top Floor Gallery and Mezzanine Gallery respectively.

We’d love you to join us from 2pm as we raise a glass with the artists and celebrate the opening of three new collections across the gallery.

OPENING RECEPTION
Miranda Joy Summers | Threshold
Saturday, 15 August, 2–4pm
Michael Reid Southern Highlands
11b Old Hume Highway
Berrima NSW 2577

Miranda Joy Summers

08/08/2026

ANNOUNCING: Susan Morris, ‘Looking for Leaves, Finding Flowers’ | Opening August 14 | Top Floor Gallery

We are delighted to announce the return of Melbourne-based painter Susan Morris with ‘Looking for Leaves, Finding Flowers’, opening this month at Michael Reid Southern Highlands.

With great dexterity and patience, Morris paints the beloved forms of Australian botanical still life. Banksias, flowering gums, eucalyptus and proteas are gathered into vessels, their branches twisting, reaching and, at times, almost spilling beyond the picture plane. Against simplified grounds—often a single field of colour—the arrangements are allowed to stand on their own terms. In doing so, Morris evokes Margaret Preston’s notion of still life as a laboratory in which the fundamental concerns of painting may be tested.

Morris moves effortlessly between dramatically darkened grounds and luminous, high-key compositions. The former recall the tradition of Dutch still-life painting, their finely handled forms emerging from cloistered, atmospheric spaces where sprays of yellow wattle seem almost to glow from within the darkness. The latter embrace clarity and openness, allowing branches, buds and blossoms to unfold with measured precision against fields of light.

Nested within the exhibition’s title is the idea of accidental discovery—a sudden and welcome surprise. While combing through a tangle of leaves, one chances upon a beautiful flower. Encountering this collection feels much the same.

To register your interest in a priority preview catalogue, head to the link in our bio.

Susan Morris

Address

11b Old Hume Highway
Berrima, NSW
2577

Telephone

+61283533535

Website

https://michaelreidsouthernhighlands.com.au/

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