Michelle Hungerford: Tough Ground | Deep Heart

Notes From the Artist

The desert is a harsh and tough environment…but it endures, sometimes viewed as a vast emptiness with few signs of life.

This misconception melts away when the rains come and the soft heart of the desert is exposed. This is seen in the gentle rhythms and repetitions of the grasses; the colours and shapes of the wildflowers; the reflections in the ephemeral lakes; the rocky outcrops newly cleansed; and the vast veil like salt pans stretching to the horizon.

For me, travelling to the desert or anywhere new, has a way of resetting my creative thinking and expression through being challenged by difference and trying to adapt to it.

I have had 2 such resets in the last few years through travels to India in 2023 and Newhaven Sanctuary in the Northern Territory in 2024 to learn about the work of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and the rich ecology of the desert.

Someone asked me how I could possibly go to a new place for such short periods of time and find a way to paint my experience. My early life has much to do with the answer.

As a child, my family moved towns often and this way of life played a large part in my formation. Adapting quickly and being curious to new surroundings and feeling like an outsider meant that I was an observer, a necessary attribute for a painter. I learnt to get to the visual heart of a place quickly. Observations of rhythms and repetition in daily life and the landscape are things which always seem to emerge in my work.

In recent work, repetition has become a meditative action for me while I paint. It helps to separate my conscious thoughts from the flow state of creating which has always been important part of my artistic process.

In this new series from the desert, the grasses, ephemeral lakes and rocky outcrops have provided focus for the repetition and rhythm in the paintings.

The challenge is always to make a work that maintains interest, without predictability, and that with time, will speak to the heart.

Michelle Hungerford, 2025