EXPANSION, The Landscapes of Michelle Teear

By Amber Creswell Bell

For Michelle Teear, the Australian landscape is not simply a subject to be observed – it is a place to return to, to recalibrate, and to exist without condition. While many artists draw from the land as visual reference, Teear approaches it as something far more intimate: a site of emotional architecture, memory, and release.

Born in Sydney, her practice has increasingly gravitated towards remote and arid regions – places where the human world recedes and something quieter, more elemental takes hold. “There’s an absence of expectation out there,” she reflects. “It’s a rare opportunity to connect with myself and something far bigger than me.” In these vast, exposed terrains, stripped back to geology and light, Teear finds both clarity and perspective – not just on landscape, but on life itself.

Underlying Tear’s practice is a deeply personal framework. Identifying as a queer disabled woman, she speaks openly about navigating a world that is not always designed with her in mind. Experiences of exclusion – both overt and subtle – have shaped her understanding of space, belonging, and visibility. In this context, the remote landscapes she inhabits take on an added significance. “They’re the only places where I feel I can exist wholly as myself,” she reflects.

Her paintings move between representation and abstraction, anchored by a distinctive language of mark-making. Broad, gestural strokes suggest movement and immediacy, while delicate, transparent layers invite closer looking. Each work emerges intuitively, guided less by strict composition and more by a felt response to place. “It’s always a conversation between what I’ve seen and what I’m feeling at that moment,” she says. “Sometimes it’s literal, sometimes it slips into imagination.” This interplay between observation and intuition is central to Teear’s practice. While her works are often grounded in field sketches made on research trips, they instead become starting points for something more fluid and internal.

Nowhere is this more evident than in her recent body of work, Expansion, which responds to Western Queensland’s Channel Country – a landscape defined by dramatic cycles of drought and flood. Drawn to its role as the headwaters feeding across vast inland systems towards Lake Eyre, Teear was captivated by its capacity for transformation. “It can be a dust bowl, and then suddenly it’s underwater, and then fields of wildflowers,” she explains. “That process of renewal is something I draw from.”

Travelling through the region with her young children, the experience was as much about family as it was about painting. Days were shaped by the rhythms of remote travel – long drives, brief windows of studio time, and the constant demands of parenting in challenging conditions. There were moments of difficulty, including a medical emergency that saw her son airlifted by the Royal Flying Doctor Service. That flight proved an incredible opportunity for Teear to gain an aerial perspective over the country, where all the channels of water ways splay like fingers across the surface.

Yet these challenges sit alongside quieter, more potent memories: painting beside her daughter in a dry creek bed, spotting geckos camouflaged against stone, or dancing together in fields of yellow billy buttons. “It slows everything down,” she says. “And that’s important.”

These lived experiences filter directly into her work. The landscapes she paints – rocky escarpments, still pools of water, distant mesas – become metaphors for endurance, introspection, and transformation. Sometimes it can be many months later that Teear will uncover something in her memories that she can see clearly mapped out in her work.  “And so I really think that my work becomes a narrative for my unconscious in becoming more consciously aware of the stories I hold inside.” she says. “It allows me to feel things I might otherwise avoid, to work through them, rather than step away.”

Materially, Teear’s practice is equally considered. Working in egg tempera – an ancient medium that predates oil painting – she creates her own paints using a mixture of egg, oil, water, and pigment. Originally turning to natural earth pigments due to an autoimmune condition that prevented her from using commercial paints, she quickly became drawn to the medium’s unique qualities. “I loved the immediacy of my gouache sketches and wanted something that could hold that fluidity, but with more depth,” she explains.

The result is a surface that is both luminous and tactile. Layers of colour are built slowly, each mark retaining a sharpness and clarity. In recent works, she has pushed this further, incorporating crushed rocks and clay collected from the very landscapes she depicts.“Embedding the minerals of a place into the painting – that energy becomes part of the work,” she says.

And while her work is layered with meaning, Teear is not concerned with whether viewers fully grasp it. What matters, ultimately, is something more immediate and less defined. “It’s not about understanding,” she says. “It’s about feeling.”

Amber Creswell Bell is a published author, writer and arts mentor.
as published on Art Guide website.