The Artist Sphere



TERRI BROOKS – FINDING BEAUTY IN DUALITY

Contemporary Australian abstract artist Terri Brooks is renowned for her richly complex works built on a foundation of simplicity. Using a restrained palette and a focus on horizontal and vertical brushstrokes, her paintings explore the tensions and harmonies of duality, drawing deep connections with the landscape and the structures that shape our world. From an early age, Brooks was drawn to visual experiences. She recalls a vivid childhood memory:

“It was dark, and I knew I was nearly home when I saw the corner house, always with the door open and a light on, with a large painting of a gum tree on its wall. I asked my mother about it years later, and she said it was exceptionally well done. It was the first time I’d seen a large-scale painting”.

Throughout her school years in 1960s Victoria, she was exposed to Australian Impressionist paintings, Indigenous storytelling, and early abstract art influences like Bridget Riley. These foundational experiences ignited a lifelong fascination with abstraction and the expressive potential of line, tone, and form.

Brooks began exhibiting professionally while still an undergraduate and soon gained representation at Melbourne Contemporary Art Gallery. Her academic journey continued with postgraduate studies, eventually culminating in a PhD. While she taught extensively at TAFE, her own art practice never waned. Living near nature and the river, she draws inspiration from the natural world and its many mysteries. She describes abstraction as a “pooling of ideas” and finds beauty in the essential laws of nature, metaphysics, and the unseen energy of the universe. Her minimalist approach is informed by architecture and the human form—both grounded in the vertical and horizontal. The grid forms the structural base of her paintings, echoing the built environment and the organic order of the landscape. These movements are fundamental, and she deliberately avoids diagonal strokes, as they risk becoming representational rather than purely abstract.

Brooks’ series Crisscross, Radiate, and Double Check reflect her fascination with duality—light and dark, beginning and end, positive and negative. Her palette is often stark, using black and white as expressive colours rather than neutrals. Within these tones, she explores endless variations, blue-black, grey-black, warm-white, oatmeal, buff, creating subtle, evocative shifts in feeling and texture. Even when the palette softens, the concept of balance remains central, evoking the yin and yang that underpin much of her visual language.

In contrast, her paper works, developed over two decades, embody a different energy. Rooted in resourcefulness and the philosophy of “making do,” these pieces are made from recycled materials, influenced by her grandmother’s Depression-era pragmatism. Though materially distinct from her canvas work, they maintain an aesthetic connection, much like Cy Twombly’s relationship between drawing and sculpture.

During the pandemic, Brooks’ practice evolved once again. Working from home in Melbourne, her paintings shifted from gestural warmth to a finer, more restrained gridwork—an introspective turn that she embraces as part of her ongoing journey. For Brooks, creating art is a meditative act. Each line is a path, not always straight, but always purposeful, like a walk guided by instinct and intuition. Today, with no looming deadlines and a sense of creative freedom following recent recognition, Brooks continues to stretch canvases and follow where the lines take her—finding joy, presence, and meaning in the process of making.

“When you do something you love, you forget about reality for a while, which is healthy. I’m simply happier when I’m painting, even if it’s just for an hour a day. Looking at works in progress makes me think about what to do next. It makes everything in life feel a little better.”

Terri Brooks is represented by Linton & Kay Galleries.

lintonandkay.com.au

 

Urbane Gazette, Volume 7, Issue 1, part 22. Perth, Australia, May, 2025.

Fields of Abstraction

Salon
Tacit Galleries
Abbotsford, Melbourne

To April 6

'Group exhibition of Tacit-represented artists whose work featured is non-objective abstraction - immersive fields of abstraction without a specific, identifiable, quantifiable or observable focal point. A totality of aesthetic experience in its ethereal quiet.' 

Artists featured: TJ Bateson, Terri Brooks (image), Robyn Burgess, Claire Mooney, Brigitta Wolfram.




Image: Weathered Ridges, 2011, oil on canvas, 109 x 78 cm.



Installation images:







Also on show:


Black White Ribbons, 2011, oil on canvas, 79 x 64 cm.



Blur, 2020, oil on canvas, 70 x 76 cm.

Linton and Kay Galleries

The Living Ocean
Group exhibition
Cottesloe Gallery
Perth
To January 30

www.lintonandkay.com.au





https://www.lintonandkay.com.au/cottesloe-gallery/


Summertime Blues, 2019, oil on canvas, 123 x 97 cm.


White Check, 2016, oil and enamel on canvas 84 x 61 cm.

Summer Salon

 Tacit Art



Keith Lawrence
Tacit Art
314  Johnston Street Abbotsford Vic 3067

tacitart.com.au  I  keith@tacitart.com.au  I  0423 323 188  I  Wed - Sun 11-5


Installation view

VOID

Opening July 21
Kunstraum Heidelberg
International group exhibition
Germany





Veiled Yellow Dots, 2013, oil and enamel on canvas, 40 x 40 cm.




Installation shots:








Thank you Arvid Boecker

Beyond Threads

Terri Brooks
July 10-28
Tacit Art
314 Johnston Street
Abbotsford
Wed-Sun 11 - 5 pm

https://www.tacitart.com.au/collections/terri-brooks-beyond-threads



Selected works


Brown Check, 2023, oil on canvas, 66 x 61 cm.



Herringbone, 2023, oil on canvas, 66 x 61 cm.



Black, White, Brown, 2023, oil on canvas, 112 x 102 cm



Artist Statement

The paintings in this exhibition continue my linear exploration of the grid. But not as grid as straight line rather as grid as motion and construction (building).

One line leads to another. Sometimes works sit for weeks until the next layer presents itself. An intuitive ideology of trust that at some point everything will work out.

That stopping point is always the same. A compositional resolution I could never have conceived prior to commencement.

My current palette is black, white, and brown (light, shade, earths).

Installation images:










Islands and Asteroids





Islands and Asteroids
Studio release
by Terri Brooks

A series of eight readymade sculptural paintings using found baking trays.

Available for purchase via my website.

Free shipping if bought from the shop page.

www.terri-brooks-artist.com


Selected work:

Black, White Pans, 2023, oil and enamel on aluminium mold,
20 x 20 x 11 cm x 2 AU$800



White Top, 2023, oil on tin, 23 x 15 x 5 cm AU$650



Black Jelly, 2023, oil on aluminium mold,
15 x 15 x 11 cm AU$650




Satellite, 2023, oil on tin, 21 x 21 x 11 cm AU$650







FEMME

Women in Art
Opening night: Friday 8th March
Time: 5:30pm-7pm
Exhibition will run: March 8th - 22nd
Studio Gallery Group
Location: 3-7 Danks Street, Waterloo, Sydney









Panel, 2021, oil on canvas, 112 x 102 cm.



Online Catalogue: https://www.studiogallerymelbourne.com.au/collections/femme-women-in-art-sydney-group-exhibition




White Grid, 2021, gesso on hessian, 32 x 24 x 14 cm


Angle view




Studio Gallery Group, Brisbane

Opening night: Thursday 14th March
Time: 5:30pm-7pm
Exhibition will run: March 14th - 28th
Location: 7D Wandoo St, Fortitude Valley








Oatmeal, 2022, oil on canvas, 77 x 84 cm.


Online Catalogue: https://www.studiogallerymelbourne.com.au/collections/femme-women-in-art-brisbane-group-exhibition

Open Door Policy

In April Belle!
Thank you!




Carli Philips, Open Door Policy, Belle, April 2024
Photography Simon Whitebread.
Styling Jamee Deaves
Panel, 2021, oil on canvas, 112 x 102 cm


Panel, 2021, oil on canvas, 112 x 102 cm.


Available from Studio Gallery Group, Sydney




New York, New York

This is the Future of Non- Objective Art

Curator, Suzan Shutan
Opening Thursday February 15, 5:00-8:00 PM

Atlantic Gallery 
Suite 540
547 West 28th Street
Landmark Arts Building, Chelsea, New York City, USA



Enamel Ridges, 2017, oil on paper, 12 x 10 x 6".


From top: Terri Brooks (AU), Beverly Rautenberg (Us), Bogumila Stronja (FR)


Installation images via Suzan Shutan








Super excited to be in my first exhibition in New York! Thank you Suzan and Atlantic Gallery


On Solid Ground

Carli Philips, On Solid Ground, Belle, Feb/March 2024 p.122-9


On Solid Ground (detail) via Studio Gallery Group



Brown Weft, 2019, oil on canvas, 91 x 71 cm




Belle, Feb/March 2024



On Solid Ground, p. 122



Photography Anson Smart
Styling Claire Delmar

Studio Gallery Group, Sydney

Artbox



Invitation group exhibition
December 6-23
Opening Wednesday December 6, 6.30-8pm
Tacit Galleries, Melbourne
187 - L1/189 Johnston St, Collingwood

https://www.tacitart.com.au

'Precious objects desire special homes. Artbox is 40+ invited artists taking a functional object and transforming it into an art object that speaks to them and their practice. A desired object to be envied by all.

Made at Tacit, crafted and finished by hand, double primed matt black, these lidded boxes provide an opportunity to transform an object associated with the storage of the most precious of objects into its own precious object.

Paint the lid? All the external sides? All the external sides and the inside? Object(s) placed inside the box? All of the above?

Artists: Adriana Artmeier, Melanie Bardolia, Lillian Bateson,
TJ Bateson, Bruce Baycroft, Louise Blyton, Terri Brooks, Michelle Caithness/Clive Murray-White, Magda Cebokli, Elizabeth Colbert, David Coles, Lana De Jager, Merrian Dennis, Lesley Dickman, Merrin Eirth, Christine Gibbs, Paulo Gil, Janice Gobey, Jodi Heffernan, Ilona Jetmar, Sheridan Jones, Julie Keating, Vietta Korren-Steele, Kyle KM, Chris Lawry, Helen Lehmann, David McBurney, Paula McLoughlin, Anne Mestitz, Jan Palethorpe, Gaye Paterson, Cat Poljski, Linda Pickering, Shirley Ploog, Peter Rowe, Liz Sullivan, Brendon Taylor, Lena Torikov, Andrew Weatherill, Michael Wedd, Linda Weil⁠'



Contents, oil on paper on wooden box, 27 x 40 x 9 cm


Contents, angle view