Photo: Hamish Fleming, The Roof is Leaking, (detail) 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
October 16, 2026 - January 15, 2027
Opening night: Friday, October 16, 5:30-7:30pm
Gallery I, 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta
Free entry, all welcome
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You can find Nowhere Is Ever Really That Dark in Gallery I, located at The Mill, 154 Angas St, Kaurna Yarta (Adelaide).
The Mill’s galleries are open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm.
Accessibility
The Mill’s entrance has a small step into the building. We have a ramp available, please ring the doorbell and our friendly team will assist you.
During gallery hours, our entrance will be unlocked. If the door is closed, please ring the doorbell to alert our team.
The Mill has concrete flooring throughout with no internal steps and a disability toilet on site.
Read more in-depth information on our accessibility web page.
We are excited to present NOWHERE IS EVER REALLY THAT DARK, a new exhibition of paintings by Hamish Fleming.
Working within his signature gritty realist style, Hamish Fleming presents a series of nocturnal scenes, backstreet roadsides and spaces of intimate solitude. Works depict everyday scenes seen through new light, pragmatic building such as fast-food chains and service stations are reframed through the slow and lingering attention necessary for painting from life.
A contemporary artist who paints contemporary subject matter, Hamish takes a decidedly traditional approach to his artistic practice. Painting solely from life without the use of reference images, his work brings a classical approach to painting into a raw, contemporary context. A pursuit of understanding and mastery sit at the core of the work, going as far as hand making a large portion of his paints and mediums from scratch. Hamish treats these materials with the same sentiment as his subject matter, taking them for what they are and working with, rather than against these properties.
Hamish’s influences are broad, incorporating references to art, literature and music, alongside a blunt approach to his depiction of daily life. The resulting works present viewers with everyday subject matter, but almost always depicted in a manner in which they’ve never considered.Hamish contrasts modern subjects with his traditional approach creating what he calls a ‘harmonious contradiction’. He writes ‘These paintings possess a sense of inherent solitude, drawn from lived experience. The resulting works used this common experience to invite the viewer into an intimate dialogue that is at times amusing, bleak and comforting.’
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Nowhere Is Ever Really That Dark is an eclectic collection of work produced across two years. The title comes from a brief moment in conversation after I said that I almost exclusively paint my landscape works at night, which was met with the question “what do you paint? Isn’t it just dark?”, which after months of this activity, wasn’t something I thought of as I had learned that in the contemporary environment nowhere is ever really that dark – or at least too dark. Each piece in this body of work seeks to present a sort of coherent contrast, two or more aspects that seem immiscible but exist seamlessly in these images. The items and furniture in the still life’s and interiors possess a sense of classic grandeur but are also patinaed and even shabby. And it is that shabbiness, that light decay that makes these things even more alluring, taking them for what they are rather than what they aren’t – a sentiment that runs through each work not only these interior settings.
The darkly lit nocturnes take the tradition of plein air painting – usually focussed on sunlight and open natural air and apply that practice to settings where the natural and synthetic interlock with at atmospheric tension so dense it’s almost serene, like the fine line between radio feedback and white noise. They are also lingering depictions of spaces usually only regarded in passing. These paintings, while notably tonally dark, are inherently of and about light. This whole body of work is, in many ways, intentionally “dark”, it's just not light.
The work in this exhibition almost exclusively depicts mundane subjects. Working solely from life brings an inherently autobiographical nature to the works. Combined with my intent to remain fairly candid in my depiction of daily life, these works are intimate and personal, while also being broadly relatable – especially to an Australian audience. Taking aspects of Australian culture – which isn’t particularly closely tied to painting and tends to prefer emotionally lighter tones and using them to tap into a sense of shared solitude. These works, drawn from very personal, often solitary experiences are an open invite to the viewer to engage in an intimate dialogue that is admittedly, a little dark but gentle and comforting.
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Hamish Fleming was born in Adelaide, South Australia 2002.The child of two New Zealand-born parents, an agricultural scientist and a paediatric palliative care nurse, art was not necessarily closely involved in his upbringing. Fleming graduated from high school in 2019, after being awarded and attending the National Summer Art Scholarship earlier the same year – an opportunity that directly steered his career ambitions from the age of sixteen. After a brief trial of formal tertiary education, he decided to embark on educating himself independently, with the informal aid of established artists as mentors. Within the first three years of leaving high school, his work was exhibited in thirty different exhibitions. In 2023 he won the Young Artist (under 25) category at The Adelaide Parklands Art Prize for Nightwalk - a painting of a parklands waste bin and was acquired into the City of Adelaide Contemporary Art Collection the following year with his urban nocturne: Round the Side. He has since taught several workshops at both Wilderness and Seymour College as well as being Wilderness Artist in Residence in 2022. Most recently, Fleming has been a finalist in The Lennox St Art Award 2025, Prospect Portrait Prize 2025, the Live Well, Die Well Art Prize 2025 and The Heysen Prize for Landscape 2026.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body
