About the exhibition

In A Fistful of Light, painting becomes a language of instinct, imagination and dream. Developed through years of working with abstraction, the artist approaches painting as a fluid and intuitive form of communication, where gesture carries lived significance and shape can hold meaning and reference.

This new body of work explores the space between the material world and the subconscious, bridging everyday experience with imagination and dream states. Working through a slow, analogue process of searching and unearthing, the artist allows images to emerge through the act of painting itself, as painterly knowledge slides humorously and sometimes surprising into subconscious forms. Drawing plays an important role in this process, offering a direct, bodily language that feeds into the energy of the paintings.

Moving fluidly between abstraction and figuration, biomorphic forms drift through weightless, shape-shifting spaces. Membranous, fleshy and cosmic forms emerge from the painted surface, while heads and cartoon-like figures gradually appear, as if dreamed, breathed or pulled into being. Humour and flamboyance sit alongside more abject and subconscious forms, creating a world that is playful, strange and tumultuous.

The works inhabit a state of questioning, doubt and becoming, where recognition continually slips back in abstraction. Through the fluid nature of paint, A Fistful of Light embraces the tension between control and chaos, allowing unexpected forms to emerge through instinct, gesture and the material possibilities of the painted surface.

About the artist

Dionisia Salas born 1982 on Larrakia Country/Darwin, Australia. Her practice explores in-between states of being, using the material tussle of painting to tap into areas of consciousness, subconsciousness and dream states; to play around in what is reality and what is imagined.

In 2025 she was part of Tender at Ngununggula, Bowral NSW, an exhibition celebrating the work of Australian Women Artists. In 2024-25, Dionisia held two major solo exhibitions Night Jar at NAP Contemporary, Mildura, VIC and Of mouth and mind Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Goulburn, NSW.

Salas’ work is held in private and public collections nationally and internationally, including Artbank, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery Collection, and the Australian National University Art Collection. In 2023, she was selected as a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Art Prize, with her work exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

She has exhibited widely, including at Sutton Gallery, Narrm/Melbourne; Watters Gallery, Gadigal Country/Sydney; and Grantpirrie, Gadigal Country/Sydney. Salis has also exhibited consistently within the critical and vibrant artist-run scenes of Berlin, Germany, and throughout Australia, including at Pavillon am Milchhof, Berlin; TCB and Kings Artist Run, Narrm/Melbourne; and Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Kamberri/Canberra.

She has received several competitive grants from state and national arts funding bodies and undertaken funded residencies in Berlin and Australia. Salis currently lives and works on Walbanga Country/Braidwood, NSW, Australia.

Artist Website