Open 30th April - 11th May 2025 @ Working Dog Gallery
89 Chandos Street | St Leonards | NSW 2065

Unseen Landscapes
“The Landscapes I have in mind are not part of the unseen world in a psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies, visibly about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived; only in that way can they be regarded as invisible.” Paul Nash

I invite the viewer to look beyond the immediate and into the vast, sweeping horizons that stretch out to the edges of perception. My paintings evoke the sense of magnitude found in the landscapes I grew up exploring on Dartmoor. Traveling now with my sketchbook in remote Australian wilderness, I am still struck by that sweep of unbroken expanse—vastness that is both grounding and infinite. Each wide plateau, gorge or distant hilltop, reveal the subtle interplay of distance and space. Landscapes where tracks, broken fences and the marks of human intervention play an important part in forming the identity of place. I have ventured up mountain paths, along rutted farmland tracks, across rolling plains, and beside deep rivers, backed by dense forest. If I haven’t drawn a place, I haven’t really seen it.

The geometry of landscape is central to my practice. I’m fascinated by the way perspective and vanishing points jostle and compete with one another. In larger-scale panoramas, these perspectives fragment into disrupted geometric shapes. The play between horizontals, verticals, and diagonals offers a kind of musical rhythm, where one line guides the eye to a distant corner while another takes a more serpentine path. The flatter planes of this landscape, punctuated by competing vanishing points, pushes me into an ongoing dialogue between space and form. It’s in these layers—whether organic or geometric—that the heart of my work lies.

Mike Staniford - 23 March 2025