We are delighted to share that Tamara Dean – one of this country’s most acclaimed and influential contemporary artists and visual storytellers – has produced an entirely new series of dazzling, dreamlike photographs exclusively for our 2025 Country Style exhibition.

Beautifully evoking the lushly romantic and sensual mood of a gauzy Pre-Raphaelite painting while practising at the forefront of photographic innovation, Dean has cast her own two children as collaborative muses, lensing them like folkloric figures at the centre of a forest reverie.

Wreathed by overgrown foliage as they wade through inky waters in Edenic scenes that strike a balance between earthiness, ethereal elegance and elemental gravitas, the subjects of Dean’s biophilic fantasias seem plugged into nature’s untamed rhythms and enmeshed in its fabulous, fecund forms.

The artist’s closeness with her subjects lends the work a beautiful layer of intimacy and visual charge, connecting the bonds between family to her broader interests in the symbiotic interplay of human and natural worlds within a living ecosystem.

This belief in the interconnectedness of humans and nature – and the urgency of this message in our time of ecological crises – has propelled Dean’s practice for more than two decades of globally celebrated practice. “To see ourselves as different and separate from the ecology and ecosystem of our planet is leaving humanity unprepared for the world we are shaping,” she writes in her beautifully illustrated monograph, published in 2022 by Thames & Hudson.

To preview and acquire works by Tamara Dean from Heirloom ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Michael Reid Murrurundi, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au or colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Dharawal/Bulli-based artist Mai Nguyễn-Long joins our Country Style line-up after a succession of significant institutional showings, including the lauded debut of her largest sculptural installation to date, The Vomit Girl Project, commissioned for the 11th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary at QAGOMA.

Born in Tasmania to a Vietnamese father and an Australian mother, the artist grew up in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines before living in Australia, China and Vietnam, and her reckoning with this personal history and intercultural inheritance directly informs her scholarly and artistic practice. The Vomit Girl motif that recurs through her sculptural practice – including the series she has created for Heirlooms – first emerged from feelings of voicelessness specific to the diasporic experience.

Drawing on Vietnamese folkloric aesthetics and stories and reflecting on the messy edges of history, family and cultural identity, her Vomit Girl armies converge in epic assemblages, appearing playful yet resilient as they engage in imaginary conversations.

To preview and acquire works by Mai Nguyễn-Long from Heirloom ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Michael Reid Murrurundi, please email danielsoma@michaelreid.com.au

Completing the extraordinary constellation of contemporary art stars assembled for our 2025 Country Style exhibition, Djinaŋ/Marung artists Serena Bonson and Jeremiah Bonson have produced a spectacular exhibition of new sculptural figures.

Living and working in Maningrida in the Northern Territory, both artists depict Warraburnburn – the Warrawarra clan’s name for the Wangarra (ghost spirits) that play a key role in community stories, indicating cycles of death, life, transitions and rebirth. Sleeping by day and emerging at night to hunt, dance, sing, laugh and play, these spirits are rendered by the Bonsons with carved stringybark in striking black and white.

The duo’s Warraburnburn figures will play out through the gallery as a spectacular, immersive, forest-like installation, reflecting the role of contemporary art-making in carrying stories across generations and connecting to a cultural tradition spanning many thousands of years.

To preview and acquire works by Serena Bonson and Jeremiah Bonson ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Michael Reid Murrurundi, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Award-winning painter, master weaver and living legend Regina Pilawuk Wilson will present a sublime suite of colour-soaked paintings as part of our Heirloom exhibition.

Born in the Daly River region in the Northern Territory, Wilson co-founded the Peppimenarti community in 1973 as a permanent settlement for the Ngan’gikurrungurr people, establishing a vital cultural hub where a new generation has now taken up the creative mantle – represented in our show by Wilson’s grandson, emerging artist Hayden Wilson.

Since winning the top honour at the most prestigious prize dedicated to Australian First Nations art, the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Regina Pilawuk Wilson’s elegantly structured paintings have fixed her name on the global art contemporary art map.

Her practice remains deeply connected to her family’s artistic heritage, reinterpreting and carrying forward the fibre art traditions of her birthplace with spellbinding paintings that see delicate line work unspool with rhythmic reverberations.

To preview and acquire works by Regina Pilawuk Wilson from Heirloom ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Michael Reid Murrurundi, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au

Our 2025 Country Style exhibition is anchored by a magnificent suite of large-scale paintings by Yankunytjatjara artist Raylene Walatinna, who is also the subject of a beautiful editorial profile in the magazine’s upcoming Art Edition. A leading creative voice in the innovative and exuberant new movement in First Nations painting at Iwantja Arts, located in the rocky desert country of Indulkana on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, Walatinna is the daughter of fellow Iwantja artist Betty Chimney, one of the most beloved names in our flagship Eora/Sydney gallery’s stable of represented artists.

The mother and daughter duo often work together on collaborative paintings, continuing the custom of older women passing on their knowledge of Tjukurpa (cultural stories) and Ngura (Country) to younger women. As a solo artist, Walatinna only produces a limited volume of work, making her presence in Heirloom all the more significant. Revealing the influence of her trailblazing mother, her sublime new work beautifully channels the tones and elemental rhythms of the desert in a celebration and continuation of her family’s enduring connection to Country and Yankunytjatjara cultural history.

To preview and acquire works by Raylene Walatinna from Heirloom ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Michael Reid Murrurundi, please email hughholm@michaelreid.com.au

We are honoured to have the late, great artist Polixeni Papapetrou represented in our 2025 Country Style show with a selection of ebullient, optically charged, hyper-floral photographs from her award-winning 2016 series Eden, described by the artist at the time of her works’ original debut as a controlled study of floral abundance. The sitter in several photographs from Papapetrou’s Eden series is her daughter, Olympia, who appears enmeshed within a pictorially dense and dazzling profusion of cascading blooms.

Beautifully entwining the symbolism of flowers and their suggestions of nature’s cycles of life and death with the early flushes of adolescence and the shift from childhood to maturity, works from Eden count among Papapetrou’s most indelible images, with one memorably gracing the cover of the monograph that accompanied her career retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Works chosen to feature in Heirloom include one of the final remaining editions of Delphi, for which Papapetrou was named the 2017 recipient of Australia’s most prestigious award for photo-based media, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.

Heirloom celebrates Papapetrou’s important creative legacy and the enduring resonance of her artfully constructed, otherworldly portraits, delighting in her medium’s potential for fabulation, self-creation and the blurring of reality and fantasy.

To preview and acquire works by Polixeni Papapetrou from Heirloom ahead of the exhibition’s opening at Michael Reid Murrurundi, please email colinesoria@michaelreid.com.au