The Ferry Building Gallery is proud to present Strange Land, featuring paintings by Emma Fish, Jean Bradbury, and Gregg Simpson that use the natural world as a mirror for human experience.

In her vibrant mountain landscapes, Emma Fish explores the emotional connection between people and place. Influenced by her life as a snowboarder and shaped by both her Australian roots and the dramatic Pacific Northwest, her work captures the constant push and pull between resilience, change, and belonging. Often painting on recycled plywood, she reflects on how identity is formed through lived experience and our ongoing adaptation to the environments around us.

Jean Bradbury invites viewers into an imaginative world where native and invasive species become metaphors for belonging, displacement, and coexistence. Painting on organically shaped plywood panels and creating forest-like installations, she highlights both harmony and conflict within shared ecosystems. These relationships mirror her own experience as a settler on Indigenous land, with each plant and animal acting as a stand-in for broader stories of arrival, impact, and interdependence.

Working at the edge of abstraction and surrealism, Gregg Simpson embraces the fluidity and transformation inherent in nature. Beginning his paintings spontaneously, he allows colour to move freely before shaping it through layers of drawing and erasure. Forms emerge and dissolve, suggesting figures, landscapes, or still life without ever fully settling. His evolving compositions reflect a world in motion, reminding viewers that creativity—and life itself—is a continual process of reinterpretation.