Jan Murphy Gallery presents Paintings, the second solo exhibition by Amber Wallis with the gallery. Moving fluidly between landscape, abstraction, and figuration, Wallis’s practice explores quiet interior and exterior spaces that speak to women’s experiences, time, and care.
Her works—stained, blurred, and layered across both raw and primed linen—resist easy categorisation. “I intentionally do not want the work to be too figurative, too landscape, too abstract,” Wallis explains. “What has remained conceptually is an interest in stillness, voyeuristic viewpoints, hints to structures, the land, blurred figures and invisible yet visible women.”
Influenced by the tradition of Intimism, Wallis’s paintings capture quiet moments and subtle thresholds: the window, the curtain, the filtered light between interior and exterior worlds. Through material and gesture, her practice reflects on feminism, time, and the lived experiences of women as caretakers, observers, and unseen presences.
Wallis holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Canberra School of Art and a Master of Visual Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. Her accolades include the Wollumbin Art Award (2022) and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship (2008), alongside frequent finalist positions in major national prizes such as the Sir John Sulman Prize (2025, 2024), Mosman Art Prize, and Geelong Contemporary Art Award.
She has exhibited widely in both public and regional galleries, including Tender (Ngununggula, 2025), Arriving Slowly (Ipswich Art Gallery, 2024), and The Heroine Paint (Lismore Regional Gallery, 2021).
