The Southern Landscape exhibition represents and reminds how varied the South Island landscape is.

Callum Arnold’s amalgam of place, reflection and memory captures the unmistakeable atmosphere of the West Coast. Tony Bishop builds rhythms into landscapes that are notionally naïve and simple but which reveal major (unsettling) narratives of use. Nigel Brown reaches into Fiordland to the environmental exploits of Richard Henry and the art history of Doubtful Sound.

In Clearing (2008) and Detour (2008) Simon Edwards looks from on high through the gloom of coming darkness to the remnants of light across the Canterbury Plain. As we look details, facts, events emerge. Neil Frazer’s rendition of the iconic Kaikoura Arch (2008) is simply remarkable. Michael Hight’s combination of beehives and the Central Otago landscape is critically acclaimed. Likewise Bruce Hunt's Tourist Spur and the Deep Stream (2008) paints the air as well as the land, and establishes a line of sight which places the viewer high up in the landscape.

Geoffrey Notman’s masterful Galliano (2008) and Honky (2008) look at our seaside leisure, detritus and (hidden) behaviours. Elizabeth Rees’ stacked and segmented landscapes of the Lakes District are both poems of place and songs of love. Peter James Smith’s Paradise Lost VII (2008) is a major work that combines the notions of the sublime landscape with the passage of time, Cook’s voyages and the currencies of scientific and philosophic debate.