INGALLERY.1
08 – 30 August 2026
JUDY TRICK | Full Circle – An Artist Who’s Been Everywhere and Landed Somewhere Beautiful
If you’ve spent any time in Artsite’s galleries over the past decade, chances are you’ve stood in front of a Judy Trick painting and felt like you’d been somewhere — even if you couldn’t quite say where. That’s rather the point.
Judy’s been exhibiting since 1974 — half a century of shows fuelled by a National Art School education and a restless, sketchbook-in-hand curiosity that’s taken her across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas — pen and camera always close, capturing colour and movement wherever she landed. “Inveterate traveller” barely covers it.
Judy first exhibited with Artsite Contemporary in 2014 and has shown with the gallery every year since, including two solo exhibitions — Surface (2021) and Unearthed (2024). Full Circle is her third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Her 2021 show Surface pulled from a trip to Bangkok and Cambodia, snuck in just before the world shut its borders — temples, canal-boats, calligraphy, all dissolved into layered, gestural surfaces. Then 2024’s Unearthed took a hard turn inland: Kakadu, Uluru, Kata Tjuṯa, Alice Springs. Not a travelogue, Judy insisted, but a transposition of place — an abstraction seeking the essence — right down to mixing desert sand into her pigments.
After many years in Sydney, Judy made her own move — settling permanently into a studio in Gerringong on the South Coast, a place she’d quietly grown to love over years of visiting.
Judy Trick’s work has been exhibited as a finalist in major Australian art prizes, including receiving the 2022 Highly Commended Award: Harden Murrumburrah Landscape Prize, NSW, The Kangaroo Valley Art Prize, Hunters Hill Art Prize, the Mosman Art Prize, and the 2025 Illawarra Creator’s Mark Art Prize. Her work is held in Public and Private Collections including King Edward IV School Collection, Southampton, United Kingdom, and The King’s School, North Parramatta, NSW.
Which brings us to now — and to Full Circle, the most personal show Judy’s put together to date.
The title borrows from the Japanese concept of Sunyata and the meditative Enso circle — an emptying out, a return to origins. Over the past two years, Judy found herself moving through quiet contemplation and back out into renewed energy, working through what she describes as a major life event and the healing that followed — the push and pull of sadness and joy, advance and retreat. Two figures sit quietly behind the work: her late father Harold Woodward, whose scientific curiosity about the nature of atoms threads through as memory and metaphor, and her mother Hilda, whose fifty years at the potter’s wheel Judy pays homage to here.
Grounding all of it is the South Coast itself — the escarpment and sacred mountains nearby gave her a sense of solidity, the shorebirds an ethereal lift, while the early-summer bushfires became their own symbol of force and regeneration. Deep into her practice, Judy found herself returning to the gestural mark-making and calligraphic sweeps of her earliest work — lyrical abstraction, rediscovered and set loose again with fresh freedom.
As Judy puts it: the arc has now formed into the full circle. There is a sense of arrival and acceptance.
Artist Statement — Judy Trick, 2026.
The latest suite of works takes inspiration from the Japanese concept of Sunyata: an emptying out of ideas and the meditative value of the Enso Circle. It is a metaphor of return to origins.
Time shifted, paused then accelerated as the trajectory of this latest body of work developed over the past two years. Events shaped changes within the internal and external dialogue — from quiet contemplation and meditation to a renewed energy of expression and future optimism.
This personal reflection saw me wrestle with metaphors to express a major event, the subsequent healing and recovery, push and pull, advance and retreat, sadness and joy. It symbolically references a memory of my late father Harold Woodward and his scientific exploration of the nature of atoms. It also pays homage to my mother Hilda’s fifty-year practice of creativity at the potter’s wheel.
I looked toward and immersed myself in nature, creating a sense of grounding, solidity and permanence in the local escarpment and sacred mountains. The ethereal nature and movements of shorebirds uplifted me, while in contrast the power and aftermath of early summer bushfires reminded us of the symbolic nature of force and regeneration.
These concepts permeated the new work. The connection of human and environment, as I recognised deep subconscious changes and emotional waves which brought restored vigour and a return to earlier material and conceptual practices. The passage of time found me revisiting ideas, philosophies, layering and subtracting, movement and stillness, void and gesture — and ultimately a refreshed return of energy.
The act of rejuvenating previous gestural mark-making, calligraphic sweeps and the exploration into lyrical abstraction and expression has brought about changes in direction and freedom within this latest work.
The arc has now formed into the full circle. There is a sense of arrival and acceptance. ~ Judy Trick, June 2026.