Exhibitions

Earthsong is a newly commissioned body of work by South Gippsland artist Lucy Hersey – a fervent celebration of the Latrobe Valley and Gippsland. A meditation on the deep, agrestic – of rural/rustic living – pulse of our living world. With a background in scientific research, Lucy brings a rare intimacy and rigorous care to her materials, as a form of resistance to the mass-produced and synthetic compounds that correlate contemporary art practices.

Her long-held affinity for the complex terranean ecologies and the quiet sciences of soil – pedology, earth pigments and the unseen, guide this body of work. Presented in every work across Earthsong, Lucy composes the works using local earth: gathered pigments, grounded, sifted and held with the same care one might offer something ineffable. In these vast earthbound canvases, the landscapes of Gippsland rise into view; rolling hills, vivid, and untouched bushland, and cloudscapes that drift like slow-moving hymns.

Smaller plein-air works invite viewers into closer communion, the way one first beholds a sweeping vista and then kneels to observe the delicate veins of the ground below us. At the centre of this body of work, a sculptural installation, Dorodango – burnished spheres of pure earth – embodies Lucy’s ethos of communal-bound stewardship. Created from the remnants of her pigment preparations, these hand-formed shapes mirror the epochal rhythms of geographical transformation: rock to dust, dust to paint, paint to presence and finally back to a rock-like form, returning to the ground they came from.

Earthsong becomes in its entirety, both a love letter and an original essay – an exploration of painting that is at once terrestrial and ethereal. It calls on our shared responsibility to care for the places that sustain us and remind us that we belong to the lands. In offering this work, Lucy opens a considered refuge – where we are invited to slow our step, breathe deeply and let the grounding presence of earth steady the mind.

Like a long, unhurried stroll through the vast bush, forests and beyond; Earthsong asks us to listen – softly, attentively – to the world that sings beneath our feet.

Image: Lucy Hersey, Earthsong, 2025. Grounded earth pigment, charcoal, copper carbonate on canvas. 180 x 150 cm. Photo documentation by Karli Duckett, The Good Side Photography.