Naomi McCann is an emerging artist working in the fields of painting and drawing. She graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) from the Adelaide Central School of Art and was awarded the Hill Smith Art Advisory Certificate of Commendation. She has since gone on to finalise in major art prizes including the National Emerging Art Prize, Michael Reid Galleries, NSW.

Working primarily in oil on canvas, Naomi’s long engagement with drawing, abstraction, and unforeseen outcomes coalesce with historical approaches to landscape painting. Her work presents as formally accessible but with an undercurrent of disquiet suggested by altered geologies, methods of energy extraction and future technologies. The works are at once epic and ethereal; the harmonious palette at odds with unsettling themes.

Naomi begins a painting with carefully observed skies that evoke the fleeting nature of changing light. She then applies an intervention of geometric motifs borrowed from the fields of geography and navigation that suggest a twenty-first century alertness to western perspectives and constructs. These ‘atmoscapes’ highlight the western preoccupation of plotting, measuring and evaluating the potential utility of land, sea and skies to our own ends, overlooking the intrinsic wealth and fragility of nature itself. A layering of objective and subjective modes of seeing point to the human tradition of taking aesthetic gratification in the affecting forces of nature, while simultaneously appraising its potential worth to our expansionist and consumptive tendencies.

Naomi lives and works on Kaurna land, South Australia with her family of five.