P O R T A L S

A Solo Exhibition by Tanya Demello
7 December 2025 • South Coast

Welcome to Portals.

This exhibition brings together a body of work shaped by presence, trust, and a new way of creating.

I’m grateful to share this moment with you, and I hope the pieces offer you a sense of stillness, connection, and quiet reassurance.

You’re welcome to take your time, explore the work in your own way, and bring along anyone who might enjoy being here.

Portals is an exploration of what it means to create as a conduit to sit inside the uncertainty of the creative process and trust the unseen intelligence that shapes all things. These works were born from letting go of conceptual ideas, compositions, and expectations, and surrendering instead to guidance that arrives one instruction at a time.

I began each piece with nothing more than the holding form of the circle. From there, the first mark led to the next, then the next, until a language of colour, pattern, and line revealed itself. The circle was the organising principle a place where chaos could settle into order, a process that emerged in layers, and where glimpses of something vaster could be felt.

This shift in process began a few years ago, walking daily through the bush during the first months of Covid. Nature inspired me back into making, and a meditation practice opened a quieter space to receive ideas and eventually instruction. Since then, painting has felt like taking dictation. Colour, material, movement they arrive like instructions from somewhere beyond, and my role is simply to listen and respond.

The works in this exhibition span a period of profound personal transformation a time of shedding an old skin and stepping into a new way of being. Though many of the pieces are abstract, natural forms drift through them, and a thread of gold appears again and again, marking that flicker of the divine spark that runs through everything.

When you enter this show, I want you to feel held. Even in times that look chaotic, there is a deeper order shaping our lives one we may not see yet, but that reveals itself slowly, beautifully, in its own time. Portals invites you to rest inside that reassurance: that life is unfolding with intelligence, that you are guided, and that there is a luminosity within you that mirrors the heavens.

Anchoring the exhibition are eight large-scale works, each created over weeks or months. They are maps of trust the result of complete surrender to the process, to the unseen, to the next right step.

May these works offer you a moment of stillness, a glimpse through a porthole into the mystery, and a reminder that everything is already in order, even when we cannot yet see the whole.