‘See The Sun’ Curated by Bridie Gillman featuring Jordan Azcune, Amelia Carroll, Nancy Constandelia, Nicolette Johnson, Lauren O'Connor, Cosima Scales

See the sun takes a specific experience as its starting point. Driving out of Murwillumbah I was overcome with awe at the intense, fiery sun late in the day and close to descending behind the mountains in the Tweed Valley. A layer of sugarcane burning haze helped to define the outer rim of the sun as it sat heavy in the sky. I looked too long, the afterimage remained, hovering in my vision.

I close my eyes. I see the sun.

The colour, the energy, the indescribable, the unbelievable are what the works in this exhibition reflect on.

It’s funny, every time I have described what this show is about I feel a little embarrassed, like making art about sunsets is corny or unserious or too sentimental. Sunsets are for amateurs and Sunday painters. They’re found in op shops or painted in your local paint and sip venue by a hen’s party. They’re sold in souvenir shops in Bali or Koh Samui by an artisan not an artist. Sunsets are for dabbling, for children. I have a sunset painting I did when I was seven – a too big sun setting over a too phthalo sea.

Fortunately, many artists challenge this perception. There are endless interpretations contained within the idea of the sun. The sun is universal – we all look at the same sun.

Amelia Carroll’s painting evening-7 (2025) somehow directly captures the type of sun from my experience. Its subtle, hazy atmosphere overturns any negative associations with the subject to beautifully introduce the premise of this show. Amelia’s practice engages with painting’s relationship to the digital image with her works in See the Sun based on photographs taken while living in Sri Lanka during 2024. Appearing almost photoreal at a distance (or in the palm of your hand on a smartphone), closer inspection reveals soft, fuzzy edges and blurred forms. Painting imbues these scenes with an emotion that I feel is more difficult to express with photography, conveying a feeling, rather than simply documenting a moment in time. I’m familiar with the feeling in evening-6 (2025) – of watching my surroundings turn into silhouettes, observing the flocks of birds fly across the sky. Looking for bats. Amelia’s paintings feel like memory.

Nancy Constandelia’s paintings also invoke the memories of specific sunsets for me. Her painting’s contain a deep breath. An exhale. I want to sink into her paintings, the same way I want to sink into the sky when my eyes are wide open looking up, trying to get it all in. Nancy drew from her memories of watching the sun set in Greece on the islands of Sifnos and Folegandros for her Empty & Full (2025) paintings. She applied layer upon layer, day after day, until they felt right remarking “Light and colour and time are intertwined for me”. The colour held by these paintings change based on the environment you view them in. Colour is elusive like that. Akin to physically watching a sun set where colours shift and intensify as the minutes pass.

This phenomenon is exaggerated in Nancy’s painting Penumbra V (2023). Painted with interference paint, when light waves hit the surface they reflect and refract, changing colour with your perspective. During a video studio visit, I was amazed to see this shift; as Nancy stood in front of the seemingly pink painting her shadow turned a grey-green. Another light or another angle produces another colour.

This iridescent surface is echoed in Nicolette Johnson’s Silver Scribble Pot (2024-25). Nicolette’s ceramic practice “explores our connection to the natural world and the way we assign powerful meaning to objects”. Drenched in platinum lustre, her metallic surface reflects light with a liquid quality that echoes the more elemental nature of the sun. Curling, protruding tendrils engulf the pot to create a writhing molten surface that reminds me of images of the sun beamed back to earth from Space. I think of the immense heat required to melt the glaze and invite the alchemy that occurs on the surface. For Nicolette, “the vine-like attachments seem to grow up and around the pot seeking the sun”. She has long been interested in ancient, pottery-producing cultures and their history, symbols and forms. Lustre techniques date back to ancient civilisations such as the Egyptians and Persians and I was surprised to learn that Platinum is rarer than gold, and stronger than steel. A pot to revere.

As I look at Jordan Azcune’s golden semicircle Rise (2025) on the studio wall from the other side of the room, there is a definite feeling of reverence. The space is flooded with natural light and in it the work becomes indescribable. Too much. Too special. Divine. It feels like it speaks of things much bigger than I can grasp. It too is alchemical. Jordan reiterates this sentiment, writing “There's something in the works that plays to pre-religion and sun worship, the marking of time and seasons through lights of the celestial world so much bigger than us”. Driven by experimentation with material and process, Jordan’s pieces reveal the shrinking and twisting of poured beeswax. These traces of movement are gilt in 23 karat gold leaf while the wax was kept warm in the sun. Gold – a metal strongly associated with the sun throughout history – reflects light in a way that dramatically changes its appearance depending on the environment you view it in.

Jordan’s slithers of sun, Set (2025) and Beam (2025) make tangible what is surely one of the most majestic things we can experience – observing the earth’s rotation as the sun disappears below the horizon. Reminded of the solar system we are part of, in those final moments I honestly can’t believe my eyes, it feels completely unreal. Easily missed if you avert your attention for even a few seconds, these works make this feeling more tangible. Intriguingly, Jordan describes these shapes as “based on a circle, cut with a horizon line”, alluding to a much larger shape, a bigger picture beyond the slither we observe.

A slither, a slice. Can you slice the sun, like an orange? A wedge of sun? A piece of sun?

A slice of sun is held in Cosima Scales’ painting Orange cup and slice of sun (2024). Struck by this title, “ooof, I love ‘slice of sun’”, I responded. Here light is less fuzzy, it cuts through the atmosphere of the room, cuts through the painting itself. Cosima’s intimate, cinematic paintings explore these more domestic moments of light’s spectacle. They remind us that this same feeling of awe can strike us every day in the embrace of our homes – watching the way the sunlight squeezes through the window at precisely the right angle to light up the lip of an orange cup, making it glow almost as bright as the sun itself.

Cosima is “particularly interested in how the natural environment affects domestic space to create moments of ordinary wonder”. She pays close attention to light and shadow in familiar rooms, how sunlight is funnelled through a textured glass window, cascades on the bed or renders a shadow on a wall – transient moments that demand attention but won’t last long. Blink and you’ll miss them. The atmosphere, the season, the weather, whether your neighbours have trimmed a tree, all converge to make this one insignificant moment. Looking out for these little moments in our surroundings makes for a more enriching way to move through our days. Noticing the way a papaya sits, bathed in morning light that reflects just right off a melamine table. A perfectly placed papaya, say that 20 times.

Can a papaya be perfectly placed?

These types of everyday experiences contribute to Lauren O’Connor’s paintings too. While primarily driven by her time in, and love of, the Australian landscape, things seen, conversations had and her internal world are also held in her paintings. Capturing a feeling of place, her energetic, gestural, works are “very tied to nature and light and travel”. While The Lovers (Dharawal Country) (2025) feels like an afternoon warm embrace, Burn (2025) punches you in the gut, reminding us of heat and power, the pain of sunburn and the danger of looking directly into the sun. A particularly red sun, like the one I witnessed, is often the result of increased dust particles in the sky through haze or smoke. Thinking about this Burn, for me, recalls the ever-present risk of bushfires for much of this country, and the risks that our changing climate brings. Lauren notes, “Simply, these works are about my immersion in the landscape at the height of summer, a human contending with the heat and extremities of this sunburnt country, contending with the awesome power of our Sun.”

The power of our Sun.

- Bridie Gillman, 2025