Tamara Dean – Country Style 2025

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