My Painting ‘A Rose Connection’ has been selected as a finalist in the Calleen Art Award at Cowra Regional Gallery, NSW. The annual Calleen Art Award was established in 1977 as an acquisitive art prize by Mrs. Patricia Fagan OAM to encourage originality, creativity and excellence in the visual arts, and is made possible by the generous support of the Calleen Trust.
‘ A Rose Connection’, oil on linen , 112cm x 112cm, 2024.
In Upon Reflection, Peta Minnici refines the genre of still life into a meditation on perception, impermanence, and the metaphysical properties of light. Set within austere, white-walled spaces and positioned on reflective surfaces, glass vessels and transparent forms become conduits for light’s transformation — refracting, dispersing, and dissolving their own edges. What appears solid begins to waver, inviting the viewer into a state of visual and psychological suspension.
These meticulously rendered compositions are not simply observational studies; they are propositions about seeing — about the slippage between materiality and illusion, presence and absence. Through restraint and precision, Minnici creates spaces where silence resonates, and the poetic emerges from the minimal.
Continuing her exploration of domestic space as a site of spiritual and emotional weight, Upon Reflection proposes a quiet reverence for the ephemeral — where light becomes both medium and subject, and reflection becomes a portal between worlds.
— Peta Minnici, 2022
photograph by Carl Warner.
Photograph by Carl Warner
photograph by Carl Warner
photograph by Carl Warner
Photograph by Carl Warner
May Space Gallery 20 March to 6 April
In Light on Nostalgia, Peta Minnici explores the emotional resonance of memory through still life and interior-based compositions. Anchored in personal history, each painting is drawn from objects, photographs, and places that serve as vessels of recollection. Rather than offering a direct representation, Minnici’s use of delicate brushwork and nuanced colour seeks to fragment the image — dissolving form into tonal impressions that evoke the atmospheric nature of remembrance.
These works are not simply depictions, but quiet records of lived experience. Each mark operates both symbolically and sensorily — a meditation on what has been seen, felt, and held. The series was prompted by the recent loss of a figure central to the artist’s life, whose presence continues to haunt and shape the narrative structure of the work.
Balancing wistfulness with restraint, Minnici offers a vision of nostalgia imbued with tenderness, intimacy, and occasional irony — never collapsing fully into melancholy.
