‘Atherreyurre is a deepening of my work with this subject. I wanted to challenge myself with a sustained focus. As a body of work, it articulates the passage of light over the course of a day. The works became, at once, temporal and atemporal.’
— Thea Perkins
N.Smith Gallery is delighted to present Atherreyurre, Thea Perkins’ fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Atherreyurre extends Thea Perkins’ landscape painting practice through a rigorous process of sustained looking. Across thirteen paintings, Perkins documents the sun rising and setting over the Old Telegraph Station outside Mparntwe / Alice Springs, returning to the same site repeatedly as light shifts across the day. Subtle variations in colour, shadow, and form accumulate across the series, allowing time to unfold not as a single moment but as a layered experience. The paintings resist a purely descriptive reading of landscape, instead holding atmosphere, memory, and perception in balance. Through repetition, the site becomes both specific and expansive, anchored in place while opening onto broader questions of duration, observation, and presence.
The exhibition also includes a newly commissioned time-lapse animation composed of ten paintings from the series, accompanied by sound recorded on site. This moving image work translates the stillness of painting into motion, extending the temporal logic of the series into another register. As the paintings dissolve and re-form onscreen, shifts in light are mirrored by the ambient sounds of the environment, reinforcing the cyclical rhythm of the day. Together, the animation and paintings form a unified meditation on time, place, and attention, inviting viewers to slow their looking and experience landscape as something continually unfolding rather than fixed.
