Common Ground
Group Show
27 March – 18 April 2026

Amber Hearn, James Watkins and Kirstie Ussher

At the junction of where material meets memory, Common Ground curates the inner worlds of Amber Hearn, James Watkins and Kirstie Ussher through their shared exploration of paint as a subject and surface as their site of inquiry. Intuitive and abstract – a horizon line, or a leading path through the canvas, theirs is an embodied and internalised examination into how one traverses many landscapes and draws them in, folding in a piece of the mountains above and collecting a drop of an ocean between. The three speak through paint, allowing the material to unravel, evolve and sediment into layers and meaning through a patient process. 

Beyond landscape, Hearn leans back into lineage and the self found within it – the feminine, birth, motherhood and the body. Having spent her formative years in Papua New Guinea and now working from the Blue Mountains in Australia, Hearn’s practice carries a sensitivity to place that moves between personal and geographic terrain. With cool reds, blues, and touches of orange, a patching together of line and a bulbous figure in the centre – her canvases grant presence to colour, form, layering, repetition and the primal gesture of the self.

Working from a periphery of many years spent overseas – in Mexico, Australia, Paris and the UK – Watkins returns with evasive depictions of New Zealand’s landscapes, smooth and then textured, translucent and then rich all in the same breath. Drawing from the subconscious, his paintings are abstracted carriers of memory and lived experience, vast and varying. Giving space for these moments to emerge in their own painted image, allowing them to settle – letting both himself and the viewer visit them once again.

Ussher returns to an image repeatedly, doing so through layering, sanding back, scraping – spending time with a piece, filling gaps with sand, pumice, cold wax – it is a test of sitting through the discomfort of the unresolved and letting time reveal a painting itself. Dividing her time between New Zealand and Melbourne, she attends to the process of standing back – finding subtleties of a shift in the surface, a resonance between texture and form. Ussher’s practice, a perfect indication of the found common ground – a meeting place between process and material, between artist and artwork, between the three artists gathered in a shared landscape of making. Intuitive, painterly and all entwined. 

The exhibition runs from 27 March – 18 April 2026, with an opening celebration on Thursday, 26 March at 5.30pm.