Soft Return brings together the work of two emerging local painters, Shaz Rhodes and India Swinton, recent graduates of the Byron School of Art and National Art School.
Although their styles differ markedly, both artists explore the inner world where sensation, memory, and emotion sit just beneath the surface.
Swinton works with soft, sculptural canvases and gentle colour fields to explore quiet states of feeling and moments of transcendence. Some works are light and delicate, suggesting stillness; others are dense and deeply coloured, full of movement and contrast. Pillow-like forms and textured surfaces create a physical presence in the space, encouraging viewers to slow down and engage with a sense of care, intimacy, and subtle tension.
Rhodes presents portraits that function like masks, floating in a psychological, dreamlike space. Each figure emerges from an intuitive process, shaped by memory and emotion. Her paintings dig into the inner self, revealing traces of past experiences and deeper, archetypal feelings. Thick layers of oil paint hint at what lies beneath the surface – energies that remain even when partially concealed.
Together, the works in Soft Return offer a gentle immersion into the complexity of our human experience. They invite viewers to move between tenderness and intensity, between what can be seen and what is quietly held within. In our fast-paced, overstimulating world the exhibition offers a moment to pause and reflect.
Shaz Rhodes is a multidisciplinary artist working across oil painting and sculptural installation, exploring the inner landscapes of the unconscious through mythology, psychology, poetry, and personal history.
Born in South Africa and raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during a time of political upheaval, Rhodes’ early life – marked by natural beauty, social contradiction, and the influence of strong, craft-skilled women - sparked a lifelong devotion to making by hand.
After training as a graphic designer, she studied painting at Ku-ring-gai TAFE and later became a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award. She fulfilled a long-held ambition to attend art school, after completing the three-year program at the Byron School of Art in 2024 and continues her practice through their Alumni Program.
India Swinton is a British–Australian artist based on Bundjalung Country in the Northern Rivers, NSW. From an early age, India was encouraged by her mother to explore dreams and the subconscious as gateways into other realms, where symbols and messages reveal themselves. This early immersion in spirituality continues to shape her practice, which seeks to explore transcendence through painting. Her works engage colour, gesture, and movement to create soft, immersive surfaces that act as vessels for inner states of being, holding space for the unseen and the felt.
Swinton completed a Master of Fine Art at the National Art School in Sydney, where her research focused on the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of transcendence. Her practice draws inspiration from the pioneering spiritual abstraction of Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, and Emma Kunz, as well as the meditative materiality of Gotthard Graubner and Wolfgang Laib. Working across painting and expanded canvas forms, she integrates embodied processes such as meditation, intuitive mark-making, and action painting, creating works that reflect a dialogue between consciousness, spirituality, and material form.