Silent Chords: Nuan Ho, Sol Karmel Shann, Jess Miller, Lauri Smith

Silent Chords brings together four artists who explore the reflective subconscious through figurative portraiture and still life. Through enigmatic and often distorted forms, each artist reveals a deeply personal interior world. Expressive brushwork, textured sculptures, and subtly unsettling atmospheres blur the boundaries between reality and perception, softly connecting viewers into a space of introspection.

Lauri Smith is a Sydney-based sculptor predominantly working in a surreal mode, with a significant influence of hyperrealism and magic realism. She dives into the depths of the subconscious, exploring the intricate relationship between dreams, visions, and the waking worlds. Her pieces are usually inspired by her vivid dreams and visions, with a curiosity about these non-physical entities and their connection to reality. Lauri's art often mimics realism, such as her use of silicone and human hair, as well as representations re-created in stone and resins. The process is all handmade and usually begins from an initial inspiration to the drawing, sculpting, mould-making, casting, painting and finishing, these creatures take on a life of their own.

Sol Karmel-Shann is a figurative artist based in Canberra, Australia. He paints portraits in oils, working intuitively until an image and mood start to unfold. His expressive use of brush strokes, texture and colour further develops the painting’s mood. The sensitivity and depth of feeling with which he paints a person’s facial expression, body language and context is arresting. The viewer cannot help but wonder about that particular subject’s unique character and life in that moment.

Nuan Ho is a Sydney-based painter whose practice explores memory, identity and the instability of perception through figurative painting. Using layered surfaces, fragmented imagery and painterly distortion, Ho considers how images can carry traces of personal and cultural history.

In this body of work, Ho presents domestic interiors as spaces of ritual, instability and absence. Everyday objects such as tables, vessels, plates, furniture and patterned surfaces appear as quiet markers of lived experience. These objects suggest acts of gathering, arranging, eating and remembering, pointing to the rituals through which meaning is formed within the home.

The objects and interior spaces in his paintings shift and fragment as forms move between visibility and disappearance. Through layering, staining, scraping back and reworking, objects appear as if recalled from memory, partial and difficult to fully grasp. The painted surface becomes a site of reconstruction, where traces of earlier marks remain visible.

Absence runs through the work. Figures are often missing or only indirectly suggested through the objects and spaces they leave behind. A plate, a table, a vase or a room becomes a sign of presence, carrying the residue of relationships, histories and rituals that can no longer be fully accessed.

Jess Miller is a figurative oil painter from Perth, Australia. Her new body of work sits between domestic theatre and the small endeavours that make up a day: grabbing a coffee, walking in the park, groceries, a table with friends, and the stretches of daydreaming in between. She favours celebrating the unspectacular—moments that pass without ceremony—and the textures that anchor them: fabric, flooring, objects that imply routine. The paintings are pared back and slow, looking for the seam where ordinary time turns quietly into bliss.

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