Distant Fires, 2024

Influenced by my PhD studies in English Literature, my artistic process often begins by taking scenes from short stories and poems. From Virginia Woolf to Raymond Carver, William Shakespeare to Fiona McFarlane, literature becomes a starting point to create surreal compositions. In my painting ‘Distant Fires’, I reimagine a scene from T. C. Boyle’s 2023 novel, Blue Skies, to present a surreal moment of human connection. In this tableaux, opposites counterbalance one another: laughter collides with silence, outrage with quiet reflection, all the meanwhile two dogs tussle in a game of tug of war. Domestic dramas unfold. Yet the dinner party is unsettled by something that looms on the horizon. It might be the bushfires within Boyle’s novel, or some unknown spectre of crisis that casts its shadow over the present. In any case, this threatening backdrop leeks into the foreground, unsettling some people while others shrug it off as a nuisance. A tension to preserve normalcy—a “new normal”—is crystallised. In this suspended portrait, where everyday reality is tinged with the surreal and the uncanny, I seek to explore how we continue to find connection within times of crisis, even as distant fires blaze.

Xanthe Muston is an emerging artist based in Sydney who works on Cammeraygal land. After completing her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts/Arts at UNSW in 2021, Xanthe’s work has been exhibited in several galleries across Sydney and held in private collections including Albury Art Stream Group.

Most recently, Xanthe was invited to exhibit a solo ‘In-Profile’ exhibition at the Mosman Art Gallery in early 2024. This follows her shortlisting in the prestigious Mosman Art Prize in 2022 where she was invited to speak in a panel discussion of selected works. Notably, Xanthe won the Lloyd Rees Emerging Artist Award in 2021, receiving a solo exhibition at the Lane Cove Gallery in 2023/24 which sold out. Xanthe was also shortlisted in the Macquarie Emerging Artist Prize in 2022 where Macquarie Group acquired her artwork titled ‘Even When The Room Went Dark’.

In 2023, Xanthe was shortlisted for the National Emerging Artist Prize, and also featured as one of five artists selected in the Young Talent exhibition at the Affordable Art Fair, Sydney, selling all of her exhibited paintings. In 2021, Xanthe won the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize after being awarded Highly Commended in 2019 for the same prize. She has also exhibited in the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award after being shortlisted for the prize.