WHERE LIGHT SETTLES | Mixed Media on Canvas | 80cm x 150cm
GLISTEN
Nerina Lascelles | Qdos Fine Arts, Lorne
12 December 2026 – 8 January 2027
There are moments in the landscape when the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Sunlight refracting across a lake, flickering on wet sand, or casting an expansive glitter path across the ocean. Fleeting encounters with light that appear and disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, yet leave behind a sense of wonder.
Glisten brings together a new body of mixed-media collage paintings inspired by the coastal and forest landscapes of the Great Ocean Road and the Otways. Drawing on sustained observation of these environments, the works explore the ephemeral and transformative qualities of light, and the quiet magic that can emerge through an attentive encounter with the natural world.
A number of the landscapes explored in this exhibition will be familiar and easily identifiable to those who know this coastline. Yet rather than seeking to simply represent these places, the paintings reach beyond their recognisable forms. They look towards something less tangible: the shifting interplay of light, water, atmosphere and reflection, and the subtle moments when the familiar landscape seems to open into something more expansive.
WHERE THE VALLEY MEETS THE SEA | Mixed Media and Epoxy Resin on Poplar | 120cm x 300cm | Diptych
Through layered mixed-media processes, Lascelles combines silkscreen, collage, translucent pigments, iridescent surfaces and metallic leaf on timber panels and canvas. These materials introduce their own qualities of luminosity and reflection, catching and responding to changing light. Surfaces shimmer, recede and re-emerge as the viewer moves around the work, creating an experience that is never entirely fixed.
The magical glitter paths that appear across water and wet sand are a recurring point of fascination. These fleeting pathways of reflected sunlight become metaphors for the transient nature of experience itself — constantly shifting, impossible to hold, yet capable of stopping us completely in the moment.
Informed by Eastern philosophical traditions, Zen Buddhist aesthetics and the ancient Chinese tradition of Shanshui (mountain-water) painting, Lascelles approaches landscape as something beyond its physical representation. Her compositions explore the interplay of form and formlessness, presence and absence, inviting a contemplative relationship with the natural world.
IRIDESCENT GLOW | Mixed Media on Canvas | 150cm x 120cm
There is also an intention to create something multi-sensory within the paintings. The interplay of texture, reflective surfaces, layered colour and light invites a slower, more attentive way of looking. The works become spaces for contemplation — a meditation on impermanence, perception and the possibility of transcendence within the everyday.
At the heart of Glisten is an invitation to pause. To move beyond the activity of looking and into a quieter experience of seeing. To return to stillness, to presence, and perhaps to recognise something of our own essential nature within the landscape.
The paintings are not simply about places, but about the experience of being present within them — and the possibility of finding, within a moment of light, a deeper connection to ourselves and the world around us.
Glisten acknowledges the enduring custodianship of Wadawurrung and Gadubanud Country, and the importance of listening deeply to the landscapes in which we live and work
Solo exhibition at Qdos in December 2024. What a wonderful space!
I do hope you can save the date to your diary and come along to help launch this new exhibition of paintings at 3pm on Saturday 12th December. 🥂
