Developed during a studio period at the historic Abbotsford Convent, this new body of work by Christian Dimick was created in the lead-up to Melbourne Art Fair.

Describing his practice as a process of “stumbling around,” Dimick resists working from photographic imagery or fixed source material. Instead, paintings emerge through intuition — images surfacing gradually rather than being predetermined.

Unable to paint directly onto the convent’s heritage walls, the artist began working predominantly on the floor. Using highly diluted oil paint, the surfaces take on a washed, unstable quality that mirrors the malleability of memory. Narratives remain fluid, often unclear, shifting with each revision.

Primed calico functions as both material and metaphor. Its absorbent surface allows for easy erasure, enabling multiple iterations within a single work. Paintings are built up, erased and rebuilt — sometimes five or ten times — transforming the canvas into a reworkable imaginative space.

The works centre on early childhood experiences growing up in Naarm Melbourne. Grief, familial psychology and the joy of childhood are filtered through the visual lexicon of children’s drawing and mark-making. By returning to his own childhood drawings as source material, Christian reconnects with an unguarded visual language — one that allows vulnerability, distortion and memory to coexist.

What emerges is a practice invested not in representation but in reworking — painting as an architecture of return, where meaning accrues through undoing as much as through assertion.