Desert to Dunes is open from April 11 - 26. (Wed 10 - 6, Thurs 10 - 6, Fri 10 - 8, Sat 10 - 8, Su 10 - 6). Mezzanine 55, 55 Rundle Street Kent Town, SA The exhibition brings together two South Australian artists whose work approaches this state's remarkable natural environment from strikingly different perspectives, and in doing so reveals just how much there is to see when you look with genuine attention. Fiona Docking-Winders works in close, luminous detail. Her large-scale paintings of the Sturt Desert Pea, South Australia's floral emblem, draw the viewer into a world of extraordinary colour and botanical intricacy. These are not simply floral studies; they are immersive encounters with a plant that is at once iconic and, in Fiona's hands, endlessly surprising. Her palette is bold and saturated, her compositions filling the canvas with the drama and fragility of a flower that blooms briefly and brilliantly in some of the harshest country on earth. Ben Saunders works at the opposite end of the scale, painting the broad sweep of the South Australian landscape in mixed media. His coastlines, dunes and red inland geology are built from direct physical experience in these places, observing over many years before the work ever reaches the studio. The result is painting that carries genuine emotional weight. These are not records of places visited; they are responses to places deeply known and felt. Together their work creates a compelling dialogue between the vast and the intimate, the panoramic and the particular. Seen side by side, they speak to each other across scale and subject in ways that feel entirely coherent. Both artists are paying close attention to the same extraordinary country. They have simply chosen different distances from which to look.





