Each of the seven artists in Tender, at the Southern Highlands Regional Gallery Ngununggula, has their own gestures, application, and fluidity to the way they paint. And yet, the colour red appears throughout. The raw state of bodies cut or torn or separated open. Tender care and tender sensation. “[The] association of the word ‘tender’ is that you instantly think of femininity and softness, and almost a weakness. But it’s the complete opposite. Tenderness can be such a fierce force to have,” says gallery director and curator of Tender, Megan Monte.

Artists Sally Anderson, Sarah Drinan, Laura Jones, India Mark, Dionisia Salas, Julia Trybala, and Amber Wallis explore the exhibition’s theme of tenderness and care. Considering tenderness as physical feeling, Trybala works through personal experiences and memories in her gestural paintings, depicting people in her life as figures pressed up against the canvas. Often turning to red in her palette, she evokes deep emotions and the sensation of how a body might feel in those compositions. “They often look like they’re going to be abstract, and then you get closer, and you see a reference to a human body,” she shares.

Sarah Drinan, who works in mental health alongside her art practice, creates a similar sense of distorted bodies, folded, bending, merging.

Her paintings in Tender are “a meditation on the body as a site of change and transformation, a space of unruliness, fleshiness and myth.” Drinan uses uncomfortable iconography and turns it into representations of care. Pulling reference images from pornography or typing vulgar prompts into Google and AI generators to get “a certain image I have in mind,” she then “spends hours considering form, colour, composition. The process requires trust and ‘care’. It’s felt, and very temporal.”

For Amber Wallis, safety is a key feature of her practice. After having her daughter in 2015, she began working on raw linen in a soft, sweeping, fastpaced process. She also had to face her childhood trauma; growing up in an off-grid community on a remote island off New Zealand, Wallis was surrounded by danger. Her artworks look to these themes to make them safe in abstraction. “I’m trying to transmute and recreate something new for myself … that maybe [doesn’t exist] in real life. [Such as] safe sexual situations, or … ghostly figures that are creating safety or support,” says Wallis. “I want to deal with concepts around what it is to have a sexual life outside of trauma and as a mother and be free in that space.”

Through another approach to abstraction that extends into the surreal, figurative, and gestural, Dionisia Salas explores what it is to be human. The artist depicts a blurring (through colour and forms) of hair, bruises, blood, urine, and internal body organs. There are slippages between genres, consciousness, and reality, as the artist looks to life, motherhood, and a creative practice.

Like Salas and Wallis, motherhood is integral to Sally Anderson’s practice. She shares that it’s about letting these aspects of her life not bump up against each other, but rather flow. “I made a very deliberate and conscious choice to allow my mothering and caring responsibilities to coexist with my arts practice and to let them affect and inform each other.” But she muses, “how do we hold our children and ourselves in relation to care? How does that inform them and who they become?” Anderson has made new works for the exhibition while reflecting on her practice’s evolution. With a shift from blues into greens and browns, she has created larger paintings with figurative elements, where the composition is floating and less anchored than in previous works. Abstract sections appear alongside tight formatted still life: a comment on the boundaries of home that offer duality as a safe and warm space and also as confinement. Also taking an interior perspective, Laura Jones’ and India Mark’s new works in Tender include still life and vignettes from within the home; quiet moments of reflection. They represent the inward and intimate state of tenderness.

Monte concludes, “There’s a commonality in motherhood, in care, in femininity, in terms of bodies and representations of bodies, the complexities of the human condition, but then also our relationships with ourselves, and our relationships with other people.” With a curved sheer curtain enfolding the exhibition space in a soft embrace, Tender muses on the interconnectedness of relationships and a shared sense of labour.

Tender
Ngununggula
(Bowral/ Gundungurra Country NSW)
On now—15 June

This article was originally published in the May/June 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.