Grant Nimmo
Spirits of the green woods
18 July - 22 August
Spirits of the green woods is Grant Nimmo’s fifth solo exhibition with Daine Singer, and presents a new body of work in which Nimmo continues to explore the legacy of European landscape painting through an Antipodean lens. Each painting depicts a forest scene from landscapes Nimmo has encountered, mostly in Victoria's Dandenong Ranges, including views of Sassafras, Healesville, Marysville and Sherbrooke Forest. Nimmo describes the process of walking into nature as “the point when the painting begins”. He walks deep into national forests to locate these scenes, recalling through painting the experience of apprehending their natural beauty, as well as the uncanny feeling that we risk disturbing something when we do so.
As trees, paths and mountains recede into unknown depths, Nimmo’s new paintings delve into the ambiguous relationship between nature and its observer. The work evokes the sublime tradition of landscape painting, mingling feelings of awe and dread. Nimmo’s forest scenes appear devoid of human presence, yet alive with unseen energies and historical hauntings.
Nimmo’s work to date has focused on the forests of Australia, Aotearoa and Scotland, informed by both Australian and Celtic folklore and myth respectively. Recent works have shifted towards a more purely representational landscape, as Nimmo hones his focus on studying the landscape techniques of his forebears and patiently perfecting his craft. Myth and spiritual folklore linger throughout the works’ titles - Tarry no longer, The magician god, Witch wood, The sun, the moon and the four seasons — with these reinforcing the sense of mysticism and reverence in his paintings.
In this latest body of work, Nimmo frames our understanding of nature through a series of close-ups, creating an intimacy between us and the natural environment. Works are situated in the dark and mossy undergrowth of the forest floor, illuminated by slithers of ethereal light. Mushrooms spawn from tree trunks, drawing our eye to an often overlooked microcosm of nature. Water too becomes a central theme – sometimes still, sometimes rushing, flowing – Nimmo invites calm and tranquility to enter the gallery space.
Nimmo has previously incorporated painted framing devices of borders and Celtic braids into his work. Here, a dark forest green borders his paintings – the colour, a direct link to the natural environment. Yet, the border is also a reminder that this is ultimately a constructed image, Nimmo’s interpretation of the forest rather than direct mimesis. It is both an elegant formal device and a reminder that our view is often shaped by a Eurocentric legacy of art and culture, and by the eye of the artist.
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Grant Nimmo is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist. He has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer (2024, 2022, 2021, 2016); Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland (2021, 2019); Fort Delta, Melbourne (2018); Westspace, Melbourne (2014); Chapter House Lane, Melbourne (2014); Sawtooth, Launceston (2013); Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne (2013, 2011, 2010); Stockroom Kyneton, Victoria (2012); TCB Art Inc (2011); Rearview Gallery, Melbourne (2010); and Evan Hughes Gallery, Sydney (2009). He has participated in group exhibitions at galleries including the National Gallery of Victoria, Shepparton Art Museum, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Spring 1883, Bus Projects, Westspace, TCB Art Inc, Art Athena Athens Art Fair, Seventh, Anna Pappas, Death Be Kind, Korean International Art Fair, Melbourne Art Fair, Salamanca Art Centre and Gertrude Contemporary. Nimmo is recipient of the 2026 Darebin Art Prize People’s Choice Award. He has a Bachelor of Fine Art from Monash University. His work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank and Gippsland Art Gallery.
“This exhibition is a culmination, over the past two years, of many trips out to the Dandenong Ranges, the Great Dividing Range and the Yarra Valley. These areas, which I was very familiar with in my youth, having grown up in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, have in the past 25 years (aside from the occasional visit) been largely separated from me. It is strange to see the subtle changes. The passing of time, the forward march of the human race and my dreams’ interference with memory has made everything that I thought was familiar seem different.
I found ‘going up the mountain’ quiet foreboding as a child, and even into my teenage years it seemed a place where something strange could happen, an occult land hidden somewhat out of sight from the rest of the suburban outskirts. I have mythologised this place full of dark corners, and it has melted this area into some sort of extended dream for me.
When I was younger coming up the tourist road from Montrose you seemed to enter a green fortress as you turned south along the road through Kalorama, heading in from bushland to a more cool temperate rainforest, with tall Mountain Ash acting as a canopy for the fern trees that back then merged into the road. Heading into it felt like stepping through into the mountain’s green frame.”
“There is something familiar in the paintings of Grant Nimmo. The deeply enriching emotional response to being completely immersed in the time, the temperature, the sounds and colours of the natural world. They depict, with a hauntingly beautiful degree of realism, the feeling of being within the complexity of spaces that are framed and defined, however loosely, within a densely planted landscape. They are silent scenes that contract and expand scale. Their existence as paintings today feels almost archival. As if they record an environment that is increasingly diminishing or augmented, still within reach, but only just.
The part is difficult to extract from the whole in these paintings. Edges and boundaries do not exist. The scenes feel as if they continue beyond the frame to the floor beneath the viewer, inviting a silent step across the fragile, mute undergrowth. Spaces are connected, they overlap and peak out from behind trees - some fallen and contorted, some straight, definitive, proud - they shift and bend around the life and the depth of the landscape. They are connected.
The imagery is beguiling and thick with a distinct, palpable, calming character. This is the character of the whole and this character seems to exist on its own, with or without the viewer.”