2025 Exhibitions:
EXHIBITION:
21 May – 7 June 2025
Opening night: Wednesday 21 May 2025
Curatorial&Co
80 William Street, Woolloomooloo NSW (cnr Riley St)
These abstract paintings embody the experience of being in the landscape, rather than depictions of an actual scene. The landscape as a remembered feeling.
In this series, Belinda Street creates a powerful visual dialogue between abstraction and the world around her, encapsulating the raw energy of the lighthouse, the harbour, and the Australian coastline. Her work serves as both a meditation on the passage of time and a tribute to the indomitable spirit of place.
LIGHTHOUSE
Belinda Street’s latest series of abstract paintings emerged from a deeply transformative artist residency at Nobby’s Whibayganba Lighthouse in Newcastle, NSW in September 2023.
Each artist on the residency was given a room overlooking a unique vista—beaches, ocean, city, harbour, industry. For Street, these views became portals to a broader reflection: on the pulse of the environment, the rhythm of tides and traffic, and her own
personal connection to Newcastle—a city she has returned to time and again throughout her life.
Over the following two years, the artist developed a powerful visual language that channels the raw energy of place, memory, and movement—drawing from the ever-shifting landscape surrounding the lighthouse and Newcastle Harbour.
Unique and diverse, Newcastle Harbour is Australia’s largest coal export port and a place of constant movement. The harbour is uniquely alive: colossal cargo ships, tugboats, ferries, recreational vessels, and the ever-present hum of industry all flow in and out, creating an unrelenting rhythm. This energy, both human and mechanical, collides with the wild, elemental force of the coastline. It was this movement and energy that became the main inspiration for this new body of work.
The lighthouse itself stands as both metaphor and muse—symbolising guidance, solitude, and constancy in the face of change. Street paints not only the physical presence of the lighthouse, but the feeling of being within its aura: the salt-laden wind, the stark light, the ever-present hum of the harbour. In her hands, the lighthouse becomes a figure of duality—light and dark, isolation and connection, certainty and mystery.
Working predominantly in large scale, Street’s canvases are defined by bold, expressive mark-making and an instinctual approach to composition that embraces both chaos and clarity. Her use of colour is intuitive and vibrant, often layered to evoke depth, light, movement, and mood. In many instances, colours directly point to visual references—the red and black coal ships, the white and green of the lighthouse, the navy blue tug boats, orange navigation signs, the grey and yellow of industry, alongside the colours of the natural environment. Sweeping brushstrokes and repeated linear gestures suggest tides, traffic, and time—traces of both landscape and experience.
The artist’s process often began with walking across the canvas, drawing rhythmic horizontal lines in a meditative act that mirrored the tides, shipping traffic, and the movement of time. Her surfaces carry a sense of urgency and immediacy, yet also invite slow contemplation. There is tension between control and surrender, echoing the forces of nature she responds to. Each painting becomes a kind of weather system—fluid, layered, alive—offering viewers a space to navigate, rather than a scene to observe.
Street’s work sits at the intersection of abstraction and landscape. The artist’s practice has been making a gradual shift over many years away from the representational, to not only more effectively evoke the feeling of being in a place but it’s psychological and emotional resonance. Over this time the artist felt the weight of control in her work— the pressure of structure and of recognisable forms. But in recent years that weight has lessened, and the need to directly represent has given way to a greater desire to express and to feel.
Influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists, Street extends their legacy by anchoring emotion in place. Where they turned inward, she bridges the internal with the external—merging the psychological landscape with the physical terrain of Newcastle’s coastline. Her paintings echo the urgency of the present moment: a time of global unrest, digital saturation, and the rising presence of artificial intelligence. In this context, Street’s work stands as a testament to the irreplaceable intimacy of the human hand, the felt experience of the artist, and the irrefutable power of the natural world.
For Street, the act of abstract painting itself feels like a rebellion or resistance—
a defiance of rigid representation, and a reclamation of painting as a deeply human, emotional act. A revolt against an age of overwhelming noise, control and misinformation. For Street, abstraction is a way of truly creating something new, something rooted in the human experience.
In this series, Belinda Street creates a powerful visual dialogue between abstraction and the world around her, encapsulating the raw energy of the lighthouse, the harbour, and the Australian coastline. Her work serves as both a meditation on the passage of time and a tribute to the indomitable spirit of place.