Something Wild brings together Clare Purser and Jude Taggart Roberts, two leading Brisbane-based contemporary artists, in a joint exhibition that explores the physical and emotional terrain of the landscape.
For both artists, the ‘wilds’ of nature become a mirror for feeling—spaces of untamed reverie and deep observation. Jude Taggart Roberts’s gestural works on paper evoke the rhythm and movement of rock formations and flowing water. Her compositions trace meandering pathways across line and pigment, where gesture meets geological form. Working with natural sediments, pastel, and gouache, Roberts captures the sensation of stillness within motion—a tension between solidity and flow.
Clare Purser’s paintings, meanwhile, interpret landscape through intuitive painterly codes. Her gestural marks, layered upon raw linen and board, oscillate between abstraction and figuration, drawing on the fractal repetitions of nature. With a soft, rhythmic palette, Purser creates surfaces that shift between movement and rest—offering the viewer moments of stillness within expressive motion.
Together, Purser and Roberts weave a shared visual language that blurs the boundaries between structure and emotion, gesture and geography. As Glen Skien notes in the exhibition essay, the artists’ works “vividly weave a narrative of something wild,” evoking what remains untamed in both landscape and self.
Image: Jude Taggart Roberts, Rock Story #1, Gouache, pastel, rock sediments on hosho paper 54.5 x 55.5 cm
