Nature of Australia presents the artistic expressions of Australian women artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, working across a range of media. Through painting, Photography, mixed media, and other contemporary practices, the artists explore the beauty and richness of Australia’s landscapes and native flora.

From vast horizons to delicate blossoms, each work reflects a personal connection to place, memory, and belonging. Together, these artworks celebrate the natural world and invite viewers to experience Australia through diverse artistic voices, highlighting our shared relationship with the land and the importance of caring for its fragile beauty.

Exhibition Details

Opening Night: 23 July, 6 – 8 PM
Location: 59 Flinders St. Surry Hills

Guest of Honour: Olivier Krischer
Curator: Farideh Zariv

About the Artist

Beverley Myers is a Sydney-based, self-taught artist working primarily in acrylic and mixed media. She draws inspiration from the Australian landscape, native flora and fauna, while also incorporating influences from her years living overseas and extensive world travels.

Beverley’s work has been exhibited at the Fern Street Gallery and Gallery 71. She was awarded Best Modern Artwork in 2020 and received a Commendation Award in 2023.

In addition to exhibiting her work, Beverley has completed a number of commissioned pieces for interstate clients. Selected works are also on display in a local café.

 

Cheryl Wetsi was born in Sydney, Australia and lived in other parts of country NSW, during her childhood and early adulthood. This influenced her love of the wide-open expanses of the Australian landscape, seascapes, and later the love of Australian native plants.

Cheryl became besotted with art when she attended an art exhibition during a primary school excursion, while living in Moree. Her senses were ignited; she went home and declared to her mother she would become an artist one day.

Her first career was in Fashion Design, and she worked in the clothing industry and then became a Fashion Teacher in NSW TAFE. She met her Ghanaian husband in 1986 while teaching Fashion Technology at TAFE at the university town of Armidale in NSW.

She got the calling and became a focused artist around 2005 when she thought she had better start painting before she got any older! Cheryl is self-taught, although she had a solid understanding of design and painting during her time as a fashion designer and years researching and practising in her small studio at home, while making countless mistakes! Cheryl sells her art to small local art galleries, local art exhibitions and private commissions.

Cheryl practised as often as she could to improve her art practice and focused on developing her own art style, at the same time teaching for the Department of Education as a Textiles High School teacher.

Cheryl is an experimental artist; her art is always evolving, and she enjoys playing with a variety of techniques, tools and mixed - media effects. Her constant experimenting drove her interest from representational art into semi - abstract art. She originally painted with watercolours and oil paints but decided to use acrylic paints as she was able to achieve authenticity, spontaneity, and interesting colour combinations and layering to capture her love of nature and the outdoors.

Cheryl’s focus is to create curiosity, expressive forms, and variety within her compositions, while capturing her audience with vibrancy, energy, and light in her paintings.

Originally from the UK, I’ve been taking photos since receiving a small point and shoot camera as a leaving present.

I found that photography was the perfect companion for travelling around Australia and discovering the beauty of the Australian landscape.

Since settling in Sydney, I’ve grown to love macro and abstract photography and am drawn to flowers, trees and our natural bushland.

Ten years ago, I converted my camera to infrared and now love sharing my impression of the unseen world around us.

Farideh Zariv holds a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from Tehran University, a master’s degree in Curating and Cultural Leadership from UNSW Art & Design, and a master’s degree in Visual Art from the Australian National University (ANU).

With over two decades of experience in gallery management and curation, she has served as the Director of Amin Art Gallery for 20 years, the Director of Middle East Art Gallery for 5 years, and the Director and Curator of Cure 8 Art Gallery in Oman for 4 years.

Her expertise spans exhibition curation, cultural programming, and fostering artistic dialogue within international and regional contexts.

A practising artist for over 35 years, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions worldwide and has presented solo exhibitions in major museums, including Iziko Museum (South Africa), Canberra Museum and Art Gallery (Australia), and Bait Al Zubair Museum (Oman).

I was born in the Whitsundays in Queensland and my artworks are often inspired by pristine natural environments and my connections to nature and nostalgia.

I began teaching Visual Art in secondary schools in 1988; but I have always maintained a passion for my own arts practice. Before moving to Sydney in 2020, I regularly exhibited in art shows in North Queensland.

Recent artworks have been primarily created with pencil and gouache paint. I aim to create carefully considered and hyper real miniatures with hidden symbols or meanings.

My current works are a part of a meditative and healing process; informed through my treatment for breast cancer in 2023. 

I discovered painting unexpectedly at age thirty after a New Year’s Day experience that felt impossible to ignore. Something in me said, "I feel like being creative this year!" Soon after, I enrolled in my first art class—and fell completely in love with painting and drawing.

What began as curiosity quickly became devotion. Through the challenges of building and running my own business, art became a place of refuge, expression, and renewal. Blank walls in my business became invitations to create another piece, and over time, the premises evolved into a living gallery.

My work is deeply influenced by rhythm, landscape, colour, and the wisdom of embodied practice. My South American roots awakened an early connection to rhythm, movement, and expression.

Years later, through heart-based breathwork and working with people in addiction recovery, I discovered rhythm on an even deeper level—its ability to move us out of the mind and back into the heart, where healing, truth, and authentic expression live.

Nature has become one of my greatest teachers. When life feels overstimulated or out of balance, the land always brings me home. In landscape, I find peace, perspective, harmony, beauty, and a reminder in nature that everything is in perfect expression.

My current works explore the journey from landscape to inner cape, weaving together the wisdom of the land’s elements and the sacred. Each piece is a visual anchor, an energetic companion, and a reminder that we can work with the elements, with intention, and with something greater than ourselves to create the lives we are here to live.

My art is for those navigating change, calling in something new, and trying to overcome. It's a reminder that they don't have to do things alone. The world, by its very nature, is here to support.

Most of my works are colourful landscapes. Many are somewhat sketchy. I like the drawing, the gesture and movement in the landscape.  The natural world provides my subject matter.

I tend to turn away from every part of the built environment to concentrate on the wild, the beautiful, or the quirky in the landscape.  The sea has always had a strong pull for me, and I draw the waves, the water’s edge and the expanses of the ocean.

Trees provide wonderful shapes and lines, there are very few straight lines in my work, I like the twists and turns, the ins and outs.

Being in the landscape, drawing from nature, gives me a sense of belonging, and I become a part of it while I am there.

My usual choice of medium is soft pastel. Other media and other subject matter present different challenges and allow the imagination to expand and the mind and brush to experiment.

Nataliia Hudenko is a Sydney-based visual artist, originally from Ukraine, who specializes in contemporary still life and landscape painting. Working with oil and acrylic on canvas, her practice focuses on capturing stillness and elegance in simple forms, with a strong emphasis on balanced color palettes and composition. 

Her landscape work is deeply inspired by her local surroundings, featuring an upcoming series of paintings capturing the scenic beauty along the Georges River.

​Nataliia studied fine arts in Ukraine and later refined her technical skills in Australia under the well-known artist Chan Dissanayake and Ukrainian artist Inna Andrazhevskaya. 

She has exhibited extensively across NSW and Victoria, including selections as a finalist in the Hornsby Art Prize (2025) and the St Columba’s Art Prize (2026), as well as participating in a curated exhibition at Red Gallery in Melbourne (2026).

Beyond her studio practice, she teaches fine arts and runs art-based cognitive therapy sessions for aged people within the Sydney community.

Rachel Bolton is an expressionist nature artist based in the Inner West of Sydney. Growing up in the Blue Mountains, she completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the University of Western Sydney in 1994.

She has exhibited in numerous exhibitions and art prizes. Rachel has held 3 solo exhibitions and was selected as a finalist in the Adelaide Perry Prize for drawing in 2023.

Her vibrant works are focused on capturing nature and the details of found treasures. “Growing up in the Blue Mountains, I felt a strong connection with nature. Living in the Inner West of Sydney,

I am constantly trying to find ways to connect with nature in a more urban environment. Discovering, appreciating, collecting, curating and recording are some of the ways I do this”. She works primarily in acrylic and watercolour.

Saliha Tacal Tajhal came to painting later in life, not through formal training, but through necessity, love, and human connection.

Her artistic journey began while caring for an eighty-four-year-old woman living with dementia. Together, they drew, coloured, and slowly dared to paint , discovering, in that shared quiet space, both companionship and creative truth.

That woman, Alicia Edwards, became Saliha’s first and most honest muse.

Despite dementia, Alicia recognised what Saliha herself had not yet fully claimed: her gift. “Saliha, you can paint that sky,” Alicia would say. “You do everything with such pride — with all your heart and soul.” This exhibition, and much of Saliha’s work since, is created in her honour.

Saliha’s art is unpretentious and deeply intuitive. She paints life as she sees and feels it, refusing trends, categories, or fashionable constraints. Working across oils, acrylics, watercolours, graphite, and Prismacolour pencils, her practice is fluid and responsive — driven by instinct rather than doctrine. Each work is an act of gratitude: for life’s vicissitudes, for survival, and for the collective journeys we share

Career milestones include: migration from Turkey to Australia over fifty years ago; a successful career in fashion design; dressing celebrities; staging a fashion show at the Sydney Opera House; and exhibiting widely in Sydney, including at Mosman Art Gallery and Lane Cove Gallery.

Born in Turkey, Saliha migrated to Australia alone over fifty years ago, an unsupported young woman guided largely by intuition and ancestral strength. She raised two daughters as a single mother, built a successful career in fashion design, dressed celebrities, and even staged a fashion show at the Sydney Opera House. Throughout her life, creativity has been both her livelihood and her compass.

Her path has not been linear. She has known fearlessness and collapse, grand ambition and rock bottom. Yet creativity remained irrepressible. After rebuilding herself once more, Saliha returned fully to painting ,finding in it a profound sense of belonging, freedom, and reconciliation with life.

Today, her work reflects a woman unapologetically shaped by experience. Versatile, instinctual, and impossible to contain within a single field or style, Saliha Tacal Tajhal paints with emotional honesty and spiritual curiosity. She continues to capture fleeting reflections, skies, bridges, waters, moments of stillness, as if listening to something larger unfolding quietly within.

Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Mosman Art Gallery, Lane Cove Gallery, and as a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize. She lives and works in Sydney, inspired by life in all its forms, and occasionally, by puppies.

 

Tetiana Koldunenko (b. 1977, Kyiv, Ukraine) is a painter, designer, and illustrator based in Chatswood, NSW, Australia. Trained at the Ukrainian Academy of Art and Architecture, the Florence Design Academy (Master of Design), and UNSW Sydney (Master of Design, Honours), she works primarily in acrylic and oil on sculptural relief bases.

Koldunenko is best known for her highly textural, naturalistic paintings of Australian flora and seascapes, which blend painterly detail with tactile, sculptural surfaces. Her practice centres on close studies of Australian trees, plants, and landscapes, examining individuality, colour, and light. Important projects and series include Tree Portraits series - Echoes of the Bush, and her Australiana seascape period (2022–23). By sculpting shallow reliefs and layering colour, she highlights the unique character of each plant, presenting the bush not as a single mass of green but as a collection of distinct and vibrant individuals. Koldunenko has exhibited widely, beginning with a solo exhibition in Kyiv in 2010, followed by numerous group and solo shows across Sydney and beyond. Notable exhibitions include All For You at Global Gallery (2011), Australiana at Incinerator Art Space (2022), Colours of Freedom at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf (2023), solo Rooted in Nature at Art Space on The Concourse (2024), and Spirit of the Peninsula at Northern Beaches Gallery(2025), Echoes of the Bush at Art Space on The Concourse (2026).

Her works are held in the City of Sydney Civic Collection as well as in private collections in Australia and internationally. Koldunenko is the winner of the Gallery 11:11 Art Prize and a finalist in the Northern Beaches Summer Art Prize (2025), 40x40 Newcastle Art Space Prize (2025), Hunters Hill Art Prize (2024, 2026), Northern Beaches Gallery Art Prize (2024), Bluethumb Art Prize (2023), and the Small Works Show, Brunswick Street Gallery (2011, 2024, 2026). 

Artworks