Soft Return brings together the work of two emerging Northern Rivers painters and recent art school graduates, Shaz Rhodes (Byron School of Art) and India Swinton (National Art School).

Although their styles are very different, both artists explore the inner world – where sensation, memory, and emotion sit just beneath the surface.

Swinton works with soft, sculptural canvases and gentle colour fields to explore quiet states of feeling and moments of transcendence. Whereas Rhodes presents portraits that function like masks, floating in a psychological, dreamlike space revealing traces of past experiences and deeper, archetypal feelings.

Together, the works in Soft Return offer a gentle immersion into the complexity of human experience inviting viewers to move between tenderness and intensity, between what can be seen and what is quietly held within.

Shaz Rhodes, Softening Encounter, 2025, image courtesy the artist.