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 new series of abstract expressionist paintings emerges from a deeply transformative experience during her artist residency at Nobby’s Lighthouse in Newcastle, NSW. These works encapsulate a vivid interplay between place, memory, and the raw energy of the landscape surrounding the iconic lighthouse and the bustling Newcastle Harbour. Through bold, gestural strokes, dynamic forms, and vivid bursts of colour, Street channels the unspoken rhythms of the environment into expressive, abstract compositions.
Street embraces a visual language that is both primal and poetic. The large-scale canvases capture the windswept nature of the coastline, the shifting tides, and her own personal history and experiences of the region. Her gestures are not merely marks on a surface but reverberations of the very air she breathed, the salty sea breezes, the crashing waves, and the steady presence of the lighthouse itself. In this series, Street channels the raw energy of the natural world—its beauty, its harshness, and its fleeting moments—into a visceral exploration of form and colour.
The lighthouse itself serves as a metaphor for guidance, isolation, and the interplay between light and darkness. Standing tall at the edge of the sea, Nobby’s Lighthouse represents a constant amidst change, a source of comfort and safety, and a reminder of the tension between the familiar and the unknown. Street’s paintings echo this metaphor through stark contrasts of light and shadow, heavy lines, and fluid, sweeping gestures that recall the lighthouse’s dual role as both a beacon and a sentinel.
These paintings are a deeply personal exploration of Street’s own confrontation with the vastness of the world and her place within it. The residency at the lighthouse allowed her to reflect on the solitude and transience of life—how, like the lighthouse itself, she stands as a solitary figure, continually navigating the ever-changing tides of time and experience. In these paintings, Street engages with the uncertainty of existence, where the boundaries between self and world blur. The landscapes are not simply of the natural world, but of her internal, ever-shifting emotional and psychological landscape, where questions of isolation, memory, and time unfold. Each brushstroke, each gesture, becomes a meditative act—a way of grappling with life’s impermanence and the tension between light and darkness, presence and absence. Through her work, Street invites the viewer into this personal dialogue, a journey through her own existential reflections where the forces of nature and the human condition intersect.