Brooke van Ruiswyk

‘The Country Within”, new paintings transform memories of north-west Tasmania into atmospheric meditations on landscape, solitude and belonging.

Launceston-based artist Brooke van Ruiswyk who is drawing on memories of growing up in north-west Tasmania, the exhibition brings together an evocative new body of paintings exploring the powerful connections between landscape, memory and belonging.

Van Ruiswyk has presented solo exhibitions interstate and has been selected for numerous art prizes across Australia, including Tasmania’s Glover Prize. The Country Within marks her return to a significant exhibition in northern Tasmania after many years, offering audiences a timely opportunity to encounter the work of an artist living and practising in Launceston.

The exhibition presents a new chapter in van Ruiswyk’s practice, translating Tasmania’s distinctive atmosphere into paintings that are intimate, emotionally resonant and open to personal interpretation.

A landscape remembered

Rather than depicting specific locations, the works occupy the shifting space between observation and recollection. Familiar yet deliberately undefined, their softened horizons and expansive skies invite viewers to recognise something of their own experience—a place remembered rather than precisely known.

For van Ruiswyk, landscape is both a physical environment and an inner terrain. Changing skies, solitary forms and muted horizons become expressions of reflection, resilience and renewal. The country within and the country beyond are inseparable, each continually shaping the other.

Across the exhibition, the sky takes on a central emotional presence. Shifting light and layered cloud formations suggest movement and transformation, while broad horizons evoke openness and possibility. More than a backdrop, the sky encourages a slower, more attentive way of looking—one in which stillness becomes a form of connection.

Fog appears as a recurring metaphor for memory: veiling and revealing, softening edges and reshaping places through time. Together, sky and fog create atmospheric spaces where certainty gives way to feeling and the emotional landscape becomes as vivid as the physical one.

Exhibition continues to 3 September 2026.