Tim Burns: Fourteen empty vases - where have all the flowers gone?
26 June - 18 July 2026
Overview
Tim Burns, Fourteen empty vases - where have all the flowers gone?
 
I found each of these abandoned  vases in op shops. I thought their simple forms very beautiful and compelling,
I wanted to paint them, to revere them. 
I watched them as they accumulated in the studio, thinking how unadorned and naked they appeared when empty of flowers .They were hollow like a shell.
They seemed to be asking 
'' where have all the flowers gone ?"
Each vase feels  the melancholic absence of their flowers.
They each speak of our increasing alienation from, and willful destruction of nature.
They now hold only the  memory of the natural world.
 
- Tim Burns, 2026
 

 

For more than four decades, Tim Burns has developed a distinctive visual language shaped by a deep engagement with the Tasmanian landscape. Living and working on Lunawanna-alonnah/Bruny Island since 2013, his paintings distil experiences of place into lyrical abstractions that balance gesture, rhythm and quiet observation. While rooted in specific locations including Cloudy Bay, the Huon Valley, the Bay of Fires and Lutruwita/Tasmania’s south-west coast - his works evoke broader ideas of memory, movement and the ever-changing nature of landscape.

 

As writer Dr David Hansen observed, “while Burns’s is very much an art of place, it is of place distilled and clarified. Colour and light emulsify. The rich, encrusted red-browns are at once rusted iron and crusty tree-bark, the swept grey-greens blued steel and eucalyptus foliage.”

 

Burns has held more than thirty solo exhibitions and exhibited extensively throughout Australia. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, he has won both the Fleurieu Biennale Art Prize and the City of Hobart Art Prize, and has been a finalist in many of Australia’s most prestigious awards, including the Redlands Art Prize, the Paddington Art Prize, the Blake Prize and the Wynne Prize.

 

His work is held in major public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Significant corporate and private collections include Artbank, the Holmes à Court Collection, the Quamby Collection and the Macquarie Bank Collection, alongside numerous collections throughout Australia and internationally.

 

 

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