The Heaviness of Light
Exhibition Dates: November 19th - 29th
Opening Night: Saturday November 22nd 2pm
Business Hours: Wed-Fri 10am-4pm, Sat 10am - 2pm
Artists: Alex Watts, Daniel Rivers, Natalie Lapardin
This group exhibition explores the emotional and visual weight of light - how it shapes the everyday, reveals and conceals, and carries atmosphere, memory, and tension. Through diverse artistic practices, the works consider light in its many forms: what it highlights, softens, obscures, or holds.
Alex Watts
Alex Watts is a visual artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her oil paintings capture fleeting moments of impermanence and quiet transformation translated through light and shadow. Drawn from personal memory and lived experience, her work lingers in theromantic, nostalgic fragments of time. Her paintings invite reflection on the subtleties of connection, loss, and the beauty of what so often goes unnoticed.
Alex Watts’ practice is rooted in longing, tenderness, and softness. Over the past year, painting has become a way for her to explore what it means to find a sense of home and belonging.
Working from memory and emotion, she captures the intimacy of small, quiet moments that resonate with something larger: connection, change, and the passage of time. There is a gentle melancholy in these scenes, but also comfort, a kind of bittersweetness that embraces both the beauty and fragility of being present.
Daniel Rivers
Daniel Rivers is an Australian artist and architect based in Lake Macquarie, NSW. Working primarily with soft pastels, his practice explores light, atmosphere, and place through careful observations - shifting shadows, drifting clouds, and moments unfolding. With a background in architecture and a lifelong love of sketching, Rivers has cultivated a discipline of observation and documentation - drawing as a tool for discovery and a way of seeing. His works trace a personal geography: a childhood near the Wollemi, the sandstone escarpments of the Illawarra, and the shifting coastal light of Lake Macquarie. For Heaviness of Light, Rivers presents new works that consider both the delicacy and intensity of light, and its power to transform the Australian landscape in moments that are alive and drenched in colour.
Natalie Lapardin
Natalie Lapardin is a Sydney-based realist painter with a background in both academic study and formal training at the Julian Ashton Art School. Her current body of work centres on still life, where she explores the quiet beauty of everyday objects.
“For this show my still life paintings feature subjects that have been soaked by the sun for their very existence. I like to think that gives them an inner glow, which Is something I aim to capture through the saturation of colors, contrast of light and dark, and the subtle nuances of reflected light. It is not an oppressive light that comes through my studio window, but rather a strong, diffused illumination that reveals the beauty of the everyday.’