Explorations brings together the work of artists Steve Waller and Leah Thiessen in an exhibition that celebrates curiosity, observation, and the ongoing process of discovery through art.
For both artists, making art is a way of exploring ideas, materials, and experiences. While intuition and personal expression play an important role, their practices are also shaped by reflection, experimentation, and a desire to better understand the world around them. Their studies in art provided a foundation for critical thinking, but it is through years of sustained practice that their work has continued to evolve.
The exhibition invites audiences to engage with artworks that emerge from careful looking, questioning, and investigation. Each piece reflects a process of exploration – of form, meaning, memory, place, or perception – encouraging viewers to slow down and spend time with what they encounter.
In a culture often driven by speed and distraction, Explorations offers space for attention and contemplation. Rather than presenting fixed answers, the works open pathways for personal interpretation, conversation, and connection.
Together, Waller and Thiessen remind us that art is not only about what we know, but also about what we continue to discover.
Bios
Leah Thiessen is a Northern Rivers-based painter whose richly layered and textured works are inspired by the landscapes and waterways surrounding her studio on the edge of the Terranora Broadwater. Working intuitively and expressively, she creates paintings that capture the energy, memory, and feeling of place rather than depicting specific locations. Through a process of layering, scraping back, and reworking surfaces, her paintings evolve as explorations of perception and experience.
Thiessen completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Southern Cross University in 2014 and is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne, Despard Gallery, Hobart, and Lethbridge Gallery, Brisbane. She has exhibited extensively across Australia and has been a finalist in numerous prestigious art prizes.
Steve Waller's practice explores drawing as an act of both presence and disappearance, investigating the unstable nature of time, memory, and perception. Working primarily with charcoal, graphite, oilstick, and fragmented materials, he creates works that exist between emergence and erasure, where traces, marks, and absences become central subjects.
Influenced by ideas of disrupted and non-linear time, Waller's drawings examine how the past continues to haunt the present and how imagined futures can remain unresolved or out of reach. His works often function as sites of inquiry, where cultural memory, personal reflection, and collective histories intersect.
Rather than seeking clear representation, Waller embraces ambiguity and transformation. Through layered processes of making and reworking, his drawings become artefacts of change—holding onto remnants, glitches, and ghosts of what has been. In this way, his practice positions drawing as a space for contemplation, where presence and absence coexist and meaning remains open to discovery.