Exhibition Synopsis 

The Sun at Midnight

 

The Sun at Midnight is a major new body of work by Dr Kelsey Ashe exploring the paradox of illumination within darkness. Created over a twelve-month cycle aligned with solstices, equinoxes, meteor showers, eclipses, and lunar phases, the exhibition reflects a deeply immersive engagement with landscape, cosmology, memory, and myth.

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Working across large-scale screenprint, drawing, and installation, Ashe transforms the Western Australian landscape into a luminous psychological terrain where shoreline, forest, night sky, and inner experience dissolve into one another. Created through field-based observation, nocturnal wandering, wild swimming, and experimental print processes, the works evoke landscape not simply as scenery, but as a living and responsive presence.

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Combining botanical pigments, wax-reduction screenprinting, rare earth photoluminescent materials, and hand-drawn stencil processes, the works shift between day and night states — holding traces of tidal marks, ash, mineral residue, moonlight, and atmospheric encounter within their surfaces. Apparitions emerge slowly from darkness: shell figures, distant lights, spectral coastlines, sacred rivers, moons, and submerged mythologies.

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Drawing from surrealism, eco-poetics, feminist thought, and Southern Hemisphere cosmologies, The Sun at Midnight considers how mystery persists within an increasingly rational and technologically mediated world. The exhibition invites viewers into a contemplative experience of the numinous — a place where darkness becomes not absence, but revelation.

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