A flag for the lost and found country, 2024

The volcanic plugs of the Glasshouse Mountains, known in Aboriginal language as daki common, carry stories of removal and survival, of subversions in perception. Massive, yet appearing at times illusory, they remind me of the mantra my teacher muttered gently as he wandered around the art studio: ‘lost and found, lost and found, lost and found…’ This mantra influences the way I think about painting landscape. The illusory nature of it, a willingness to embrace loss and discover anew. A finished painting is the relic of that inner/outer journey.

Dan Nelson is a Muloobinba-based artist whose paintings are abstract yet strongly connected to the Australian landscape, particularly through colour and the quality of light. Her works play with strange ambiguities, drifting between recognisable elements and the sensed experience of a particular place and moment in time.

Nelson holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts and originally trained as a fine arts printmaker. This foundation in print processes and aesthetics continues to inform her practice as a painter. She tends to work in sequences, a practice that stems from the repetitive, mutative nature of the printmaking process and reflects her interest in temporality – how time shapes our sense of being in the world.

Nelson has had five solo exhibitions and participated in several curated group exhibitions. She was selected as the University of Newcastle Alumni Awards Artist for 2022. In 2023 she was Highly Commended in the 2024 Milburn Art Prize for Landscape and was selected as a finalist in the 9×5 Landscape Art Prize 2024. Her work is represented in the University of Newcastle Collection and in many private collections.