Stephanie Tabram: The River
opening night, THURSDAY 5 MARCH, 2026
For more than fifteen years, I have lived above the river where estuarine waters meet mountain streams. Walking the river has become a daily ritual and a foundational component of my practice, undertaken prior to entering the studio. Through sustained observation, the river’s shifting moods - its light, colour and movement - have become central to my work.
This exhibition arises from an ongoing relationship with the river and offers a meditation on water as a living system - one that connects past and present, land and memory, and observation with making.
- Stephanie Tabram, 2026
Stephanie Tabram, born in the United Kingdom, presently living and working outside of Hobart is one of Tasmania’s most collected artists. Tabram has been painting for more than thirty years, having completed her studies in Sydney in 1989. Her exquisite paintings speak of the Tasmanian landscape like no others. They are the landscapes of only this morning and yet, are evocative of the quality of image reserved only for memory. The paintings are lit —like the heaving Australian sky— from within. The detail and perfection of shadow and reflection goes beyond the photographic, her paintings are truly aglow.
Tabram’s work plays masterfully with the eternal nature of the traditional landscape painting and the instantaneous and transparent quality of film. Her images — though still, private, almost lonely —are pregnant with suspense. Tabram lets us linger in the last of the golden light on the dry grass before the clouds roll over - and then in the thick air of those swelling clouds the moment just before the storm breaks - and then in the silence of the empty highway, silver with the recent rain and lined with puddles as still as glass.
