Gregory Pryor moved from Victoria to Western Australia in 2003 to work at Edith Cowan University, Perth. After more than 23 years, Pryor is stepping down from teaching. It is therefore timely to reflect on what one might read from his oeuvre, as distilled in the exhibition Huddle from late last year, when set against some of his earlier series and statements, as well as art historical precedents—notably those of Australian landscape art and the writings of Georges Didi-Huberman. I omit from discussion the wonderful collaboration between Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama and Pryor in the series of small poetically diaristic and observational text-and-image works exhibited in Huddle, because Moyle has published on these elsewhere—though this series also addresses some of the concerns I identify below.[1] As with any discussion of an artist’s work over many years, Pryor’s practice is not confined to the themes I identify, although these are important recurrent concepts across much of Pryor’s output.
        Pryor confessed that when he first arrived in WA, even with some knowledge of the landforms of Australia’s eastern states, he struggled to come to terms with the local environment. Floral displays in the Perth hinterland seemed to him to almost be “levitating” over WA’s scorched earthen substrate. Early colonial explorers had surmised from this abundance of colour and vegetation that the soil was “extremely fertile,” but in fact much of the land at this corner of the continent is “the exact opposite,” consisting of a “bare sandy terrain with few nutrients” yet sustaining “extremely hardy flora.”[2] As Pryor observes, the landscape continues to be “asking a lot of questions of me.”
        Comparing Pryor’s canvases to the genre-defining work of Fred Williams, one is reminded that Williams was known to apply multiple layers, sometimes using a partially wiped away all-over ground, onto which a thicker impasto of “blotchy dabs” and vertically presented planes of color might be added.[3] These sometimes imparted to Williams’ depictions a curious glow; a sort of virtual heat haze that seemed to come from behind and through the paint.
        Georges Didi-Huberman has identified in the work of Fra Angelico a spiritual source of painterly luminosity. Didi-Huberman claims that Fra Angelico’s San Marco frescoes point to the fundamental paradox of art. In the frescoes, as well as much of the later abstract art of the 20th century, light comes to be expressed as a “patch [pan]” of painted matter. Fra Angelico’s genius, according to Didi-Huberman, was to use paint to allude to that which eludes visualization altogether—namely the “invisibility and unrepresentability of the Divine,”[4] immanent within the painting, creating a space in which representation “circle[s] endlessly around a mystery.”[5] As Pryor put it, the San Marco series shows that paint is not “inert,” but is rather highly active in what it suggests to the viewer (the presence of the Divine, Christ’s stigmata, etcetera).[6] Pryor says one might almost describe this as a form “of aesthetic transubstantiation” highlighting “the ability of paint to become another substance when in dialogue with the divine.”[7] For Didi-Huberman, the “patch” is symptomatic of the aporia of visual representation itself, of its insufficiency, and of that which art can gesture at, but not hold on to. God is never in the painting. Rather, spirit touches upon and passes through the work via an unknowable action beyond signification and presence properly defined.



For art in Australia, this aporia of representation takes on a terrible colonial inflection. The genocidal foreclosure of Indigenous sacrality and the land tenure upon which it is based stands between any attempt by those of settler descent to approach these ancient landscapes.[8] As Jane Jacobs and Ken Gelder point out, most representations of the Australian countryside since colonisation have had an unsettling, “Uncanny” quality. Landforms are read according to not only such highly familiar tropes of heat, isolation, challenge, dryness, and threatening beauty, but also come to suggest the unsettling return of that which at first seems unfamiliar, but is not—specifically Aboriginal presence, sovereignty and its difficult to access spiritual force.[9] As in Russel Drysdale’s Lake Mungo studies, described by Tim Bonyhady as depicting a “boneyard” of ancient presences in the landscape, forms in the earth come to stand in for the body of the absented Indigenous subject.[10]
        Pryor’s work too emits a sense of spiritually ambiguous painterly luminosity which is linked to deferred corporealities. This is particularly the case with Pryor’s Lacunae and Yilgarn Lacunae series (2014-16), successors to which appear at a larger scale in Huddle. These surprisingly lush looking environments are dense with biotic activity, often framing haunting narrative fragments. Pryor has compared his works in this style to early modern icons, which offered parishioners “in their tangible reality” of paint and board the hint of an immense, “transcendental reality” of faith and spirit passing through the work, assisting the viewer to approach those forces which are beyond all knowing but which one feels within sacred sites and compelling landscapes.
        Pryor has extended these themes in Huddle, with several works hinting at mythic or ambivalent beings active across the surface of the land. Chris McAuliffe has noted Pryor’s debt to Australian painters drawing on the Surrealist tradition, and as in such precedents as Albert Tucker’s Futile City (1940), Pryor’s landscapes are redolent of loss and damage.[11] Pryor points out that several of his pieces depict “isolated landscapes of Western Australia—many of which are landscape fragments or remnants. These works are meditations upon the residues of country” which can be read to some degree as “annals of destruction, templates of fracture and harrowing memorials to loss and emptiness” following colonial and capitalist despoilation.[12]



While Pryor’s earlier pieces sometimes recall the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Nash or Eric Thake in their sparse, blocky arrangement of forms, the artist’s pieces in Huddle are generally more densely filled in. The glowing fertility of these recent works is infused with lively expressions of green and blue—while Pryor’s more ochre-toned paintings, by contrast, represent realms which are not only drier but bleaker (see below). Pryor’s Black Solander series (2005) might seem the very antithesis of such painterly expressions of environmental vitality and spirit. Black Solander consisted of 10,500 illustrations of dead and extinct WA plants from the historical record, covering the walls of a single room at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and which consequently took on the character of a mausoleum. Nevertheless, even these black-ink-on-black-sugar-paper works had an enticing, silvery glow and reflectivity to them. Pryor has therefore used a diversity of modes and applications to infuse his surfaces with a shimmering inspirited liveliness.



Pryor’s work might therefore be seen to mark out a private cosmology of surreal vitalistic associations, planting in his scenes significant objects and figures whose precise identity and function cannot be deciphered. In The Pink Child (2022), a glowing figure wanders, head down, past a vertical plane of blue rock and vegetation. With Lignotuber (2025), curious flame-like shapes seem to bob above a marshy ground bounded by spreading fields and plants tinged with blue, green and red. From behind the tangled scrub of Carriage (2024) emerges a group of hooded figures in red robes: a more somber version of the happy-go-lucky Ku Klux Klan characters who populate the work of Philip Guston, perhaps, focused in Pryor's depiction on some ambiguous rite. Many of Pryor’s paintings from Huddle are moreover set upon radiant green, golden and blue backgrounds recalling the ambiguous landscapes of Bill Hammond, who famously oscillated between depicting “primeval” realms inhabited by striking, lithe bird-headed figures, but which were nevertheless haunted by “ghosts, shipwrecks,” and colonial “death.”[13]
        In contrast to Pryor’s lush, almost tropical and tangled landscapes from Huddle, the artist has produced a number of visibly flat, panoramic works in browns and ochres, closer to Williams’ aesthetic. Here and elsewhere, Pryor has drawn on aerial survey photographs of the broken fields and drylands of inland Perth which show the “mosaic” quality of Western Australia’s soil profiles, as in Pryor’s Perth series of 2011.[14] Pryor’s works in this mode therefore present the landscape as a series of irregular cut-ups, each of uniform colour, pieced together to make up an overtly flat planar surface.



The human figure in these paintings is present, but deferred through various rhetorical and painterly gestures, giving these pieces a sense of lost habitation. In Salt Sleepers (2025), it is the anthropomorphising title that renders the gorgeous stretches of pinky salt pans as bodies in their own right. This is also suggested through visual puzzles, as with Two Sleepers (2025), where careful inspection reveals the edges of the variegated assemblages to delineate a massive prone couple lying across and within the earth. As Pryor observes:

The mosaic of soils in the Yilgarn Craton are not just a kaleidoscopic marvel, but [by] depositing patches of paint into these works allows them to be conduits of cultural and environmental transformation.[15]

Elsewhere, rather than fusing with the landscape, the human is marked out as an intruder and despoiler. In Midden Parasites (2025), a boozing character stands at the right, visibly set apart from the landscape by his clear verticality, which contrasts with the planar representation of the country. The man both seems to rise out of, and fall into, a hollow filled with a grotesque pile of empty bottles. Here, one thinks perhaps of such works by Pieter Breughel’s Landscape With Fall of Icarus (1568),[16] where unimportance of the human in the landscape, pushed off centre and miniaturised relative to the scene within which they appear, functions almost as an afterthought. These are resolutely anti-heroic works, with their planar arrangement functioning to disorientate both the external viewer and those active within the pictorial space. Without a horizon to provide spatial axes, Pryor’s works in this mode recalls US Field Painting,[17] suggesting an almost unending landscape which exceeds human capabilities and thought.
        Pryor has noted that he himself is at times almost “blinded” by the light in the Western Australian landscape, where he takes on the role of The Pink Child whom he painted for Huddle. Pryor sees his work as addressing the problem of how to come at the landscape as someone who “has no ancestral link” to the deep, mythic narratives and forces found in this Country. Pryor describes his approach as a form of naïve but nevertheless curious and receptive “childish groping,” in which he strives “to make meaning from this process of encounters” in the landscape.[18] While those of us of settler descent do not have access to the deep mythic encounters and Dreamings of Indigenous belief, spirituality is not wholly foreclosed to us. Pryor recommends “trying to get back” to those “things you can’t [actually] see in the landscape” but which one dimly intuits through corporeal sensations and flows of colour and light. Pryor’s oeuvre offers a case study in how to navigate these Uncanny presences in the Australian landscape as it continues to generate sensations of both melancholy and myth.


Gregory Pryor, Huddle, Ellenbrook Arts HQ, 17 October – 27 November, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. Jennifer Moyle Ogbeide-Ihama, “Ngalak Wonga: Co-Creation Encounters,” Garland Magazine, 41 (Dec 2009), https://garlandmag.com/article/ngalak-wonga/.

2. Gregory Pryor, “Mausoleum,” Antennae,10 (Spring 2009); see https://www.turnergalleries.com.au/pdf/09_pryor_mausoleum.pdf.

3. Mark Dober, “Fred Williams,” Overland (22 June 2012), https://overland.org.au/2012/06/fred-williams-engaging-with-landscape/.

4. Chari Larsson, “Didi-Huberman’s Symptom in the Image,” EMaj, 8 (April 2015), www.emajartjournal.com.

5. Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995), p. 100; also Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005).

6. Pryor, opening night talk (Ellenbrook Arts HQ: 11 Oct 2025).

7. Gregory Pryor, email correspondence with the author (April 2026).

8. Ian McLean, Double Nation (London: Reaktion, 2023).

9. Jane Jacobs & Ken Gelder, Uncanny Australia (Melbourne: MUP, 1994).

10. Jonathan W. Marshall, Butoh & Suzuki Performance in Australia: Bent Legs on Strange Grounds, 1982-2023 (Leiden: Brill, 2025), pp. 63-64; Tim Bonyhady, “Disturbing the Dead,” Art Monthly, 105 (1997), pp. 9-12.

11. Chris McAuliffe, “Gregory Pryor,” from The Vizard Foundation Art Collection of the 1990s, online collection notes (Art Gallery of Ballarat: undated), https://www.vizardfoundationartcollection.com.au/the-nineties/explore/gregory-pryor.

12. Gregor Pryor, “The Yilgarn Lacunae (2016),” artist notes, reproduced on Pryor, Gregory Pryor, website (Perth), https://gregorypryor.com.au/exhibitions/the-yilgarn-lacunae

13. “Traffic Cop Bay,” unattributed entry on website of Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington. https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/729540?page=1&rtp=1&ros=1&asr=1&assoc=all&mb=o.

14. Gregory Pryor et al, Perth, ex. cat. (Perth: City of Perth, 2011).

15. Gregory Pryor, email correspondence with the author (April 2026).

16. Jonathan W. Marshall, “Brecht,” in Magdalena Zolkos, ed., The Didi-Huberman Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2023), pp. 42-45.

17. Pryor, opening night talk (Ellenbrook Arts HQ: 11 Oct 2025); Jonathan W. Marshall, “Art as a ‘break-down & cry experience’: The Secular Cathedral of Mark Rothko,” program note for John Logan’s play Red (Dunedin: Fortune Theatre, 2012). https://www.academia.edu/1510527/Art_as_a_Break_down_and_Cry_Experience_The_Secular_Cathedral_of_Mark_Rothko_Program_Note_for_John_Logans_play_.

18. Pryor, opening night talk (Ellenbrook Arts HQ: 11 Oct 2025) & also mid exhibition artist talk (15 Nov 2025).

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Header images: 

1. Gregory Pryor, The Pink Child (detail), 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

2. Gregory Pryor, Carriage, 2024 . Courtesy of the artist.