My still life painting ‘Sensory Perception’ was selected as a finalist in 2024 Muswellbrook Art Prize. The Muswellbrook Art Prize aims to foster the interest in and understanding of art in the Upper Hunter Valley and to help promote and encourage Australian artist’s and their work. The Muswellbrook Art Prize is the second-richest art prize in South East Asia.
‘Sensory Perception’
oil on linen, 112cmx 112cm, 2024.
6th September - 3rd October 2023
In The Duality of Reality, Peta Minnici presents a series of still life and interior paintings that examine how light, shadow, and reflection shape our perception of space and materiality. Translucent and opaque objects act as conduits for light, creating complex patterns of shadows and highlights that play a central role in each composition. These optical phenomena not only define form but also evoke the intangible — offering a visual metaphor for the threshold between the physical and the spiritual.
Reflections and shadows become motifs of duality — echoing the idea that what we perceive is not always aligned with what truly exists. In this way, the works suggest a layered reality, where presence and absence, material and immaterial, coalesce.
This exploration deepens in Minnici’s interior scenes, where windows and doorways function as portals between worlds. Referencing the home of the late Australian artist Arthur Boyd, these works merge memory, imagination, and lived experience into dreamlike spaces that are both intimate and expansive. Through this interplay of architectural elements and shifting landscapes, Minnici offers a quiet meditation on perception, loss, and the unseen forces that shape our lived environments.
Peta Minnici 2023
Install Images by Louis Lim
The Kedumba Drawing Collection was started in 1990 and embodies and reflects all the elements of outstanding drawing created in Australia over more than 50 years and has acquired almost two hundred drawings.
I was fortunate enough to have my work “ Looking In, Seeing Out - Bundanon” acquired for this collection
The subject of my work depicts
myself almost as a voyeur peering from the outside through the glass windows of the The Bundanon Homestead during my recent residency. Capturing both inside and the surrounding landscape in the one frame, as a play on reflections, allows the internal foyer and staircase to fuse seamlessly with the mountains and trees. My technique of mark making, formed intuitively over time, evokes the fragility of remembering by creating a blurring of focus and the slowing of viewing time. The drawn line also relates to the concept of memory consisting of a mass of marks designated into what we have seen, heard and felt.