We have long admired the work of Amanda Johnson. Amanda is an established artist who maintains a vibrant, dedicated and focused arts practice, creating very important work. Her practice focuses on the natural world she knows and loves and the negative impact human activity can have on it. 

"Enclosure Acts: New Landscapes" is a stunning body of paintings that are powerful, poetic and poignant. This show comes at an important moment in time as we grapple with the stewardship of our Australian native forests.

ARTIST STATEMENT 

"Enclosure Acts evokes the long-term environmental impacts of landgrabs and old-growth forest clearance, asking how landscape painting might symbolically ‘enclose’ and protect remnant forests. I live and work on Gadubanud Country, Cape Otway, on a Landcare property that has been decimated by introduced koalas and invasive plants. This country is front of mind when I enter the studio or undertake field trips.

My recent paintings of Gadubanud Country and Lutruwita evoke theatricalised, romantic forest grandeur while pointing to ecological disturbance in plain sight – depleted understoreys, soil compaction, ravaging blackberry, gorse and sweet pittosporum. These works stop short of evoking idealised wilderness vistas, though field trips to old-growth forests are an important part of my process. Here, forests often form seductive, painted curtains – forests that may or may not exist – framing a stripped central plain. Uncanny palettes subvert the gentle, optimistic skies typical of early colonial artists such as Streeton, Piguenit and von Guerard, whose images of settler holdings often concealed impacts of invasive species, extractive economies and the dispossession of First Nations peoples. As part of my studio process, I also map the vegetation profiles of early colonial paintings against contemporary ecological profiles, so that each work becomes a mash-up of past and present. For me, these beautiful colonial landscapes must now be responded to as images of erasure. The hyperreal sunsets are nothing if not cautionary. I think of each painting as a theatre of environmental mourning."

BIO
 

Amanda Johnson is a painter and writer living and working on Gadubanud Country in Cape Otway, Victoria and Melbourne. Works from her ongoing ‘Colonial Heat’ landscape series have been shortlisted in the prestigious Glover Prize (2026 and 2022), Hadley’s Art Prize (2024, 2022, 2021 and 2019), the Len Fox Prize (2024) and the John Leslie Landscape Prize (2024). In 2026, her painting was highly commended in the Glover Prize. Her most recent solo exhibition, Stranglehold: Colonial Heat was held at fortyfivedownstairs gallery in Melbourne in 2024. Since graduating from a Masters in painting at Victorian College of the Arts in 1995, Amanda has had eight solo shows and participated in many group exhibitions. She has been the recipient of Asialink and Arthur  Boyd Bundanon painting residencies. Her exhibition Friable: The Lost Garden was held at Geelong Gallery in 2015 as part of the gallery’s former Regional Artists Program.