ANNIKA HARDING | 'Close looking (Malanda rainforest walk)' | 2026 | Acrylic on timber offcut |40 x 50 x 40 mm

'These intimate small paintings explore the child’s perspective of engaging with the natural world. They were developed from walks with the artist’s children, observing interactions with much loved places. Each painting is displayed with a complementary one from the same landscape, representing the way the children move through and experience the world as well as the many pauses for ‘close looking’.

Mosses have been a particular obsession, through the long wet season and a re-reading of Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Like children, mosses ask us to get close to ground and surfaces and become curious about their tiny worlds. They need enough open space and water to grow, and are often part of a community that reproduces when particular conditions are met. This year the artist’s family have stopped to look at the verdant, feathery, tendrilled and soft carpets of moss near home on the Atherton Tablelands, all thriving during a wet year, as well the hardy yellow-green mosses carpeting the bush during a foggy, dewy Canberra winter morning while visiting favourite places near where they used to live.

While specific to people and places that are part of the artist’s ‘intimate world’, Annika hopes they will resonate with viewers’ own experience of childhood, or experiencing the world through the children in their lives, or the experience of their inner child that probably wants to slow down and revel in the natural world.

Working predominantly in thin layers of acrylic paint on timber, these are the first works in which Annika has experimented with whittling to achieve rounded edges in some of the free-standing paintings. She wanted to explore more organic forms, with unclear boundaries of the painted surface, and an even more intimate relationship to the hand.

These paintings and the walks they reference engage with Ngadjon-Jii Country (Malanda and Topaz areas) and Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country (Aranda Bushland and Black Mountain) with deep respect.

ANNIKA HARDING | 'Close looking (Malanda rainforest walk)' | 2026 | Acrylic on timber offcut | 40 x 50 x 40 mm