26 August – 19 September 2026 – Solo Exhibition
Opening Event – Friday 28 August – 5:30pm
Zoe Grey, studio at Marrawah [photo by George Williams]
Despard Gallery is proud to present Out Of The Blue, an exhibition of new works by early career Tasmanian artist Zoe Grey.
In their fifth solo with Despard Gallery, Grey presents a new series of paintings that explore how the landscape is seen and experienced through an evolving relationship to place. This includes Grey’s life-long connection held with the rugged rocks, fierce winds and booming swell of Marrawah, where she grew up and has recently returned to live after over a decade. This enduring bond is mapped out through paint, every gesture responding to the temperament of the landscape, including its rhythms, textures and significance. Each composition becomes a means to navigate these terrains, its physical and emotional layers echoed through bold painterly gestures, blocks of colour and abstract forms.
Out of the Blue also marks an important change in Grey’s methodology, working directly from the source of her inspiration. Painting has also become a vehicle for Grey to navigate grief, after the sudden and devastating loss of her mother. Here, the symbols and motifs within each gesture represent the feelings and familiarity of place, which carry the memory of family. Like the landscape, each painting provides a space for reflection, but also a means to move towards healing. Grey’s practice reflects these shifting forces of the landscape, guided by a growing strength that is shaped by resilience.
Overall, Grey’s work demonstrates how personal experience can inform a deeper understanding of place, visualising the many unseen components of the landscape through memories and stories, whilst affirming the valued connections we hold toward notions of home.
Click here to register your interest for Zoe Grey.
Unique to Grey’s exhibition is a series of paintings on unstretched linen, playfully depicting objects and snippets of text, described by Grey as ‘flags’. Presented alongside their landscapes, Grey hints at their profound closeness to Marrawah, revealed in passages of recorded memories and treasured moments of warmth shared with her mum. Powerful in their simplicity of composition and message, each flag inherently carries deeper meaning, both as a form of communication and symbol of identity.
