Marina Rolfe: The Edge of Holding

It’s almost midday and I’ve still got sunshine in my eyes when I step off Flinders Lane into a dim tiled corridor. Visible down the hall, Marina Rolfe’s almost-abstract landscape painting, And Wandering Through, exudes a faint glow that seems to reflect the light outside. I follow its glimmer like a beacon as I make my way from the clattering street, past a restaurant prepping with quiet hubbub for its lunch service, to cross the modest glass-doored threshold into ARC ONE Gallery.

Inside the gallery’s single room, it’s quiet. Hung at regular intervals along white walls, Rolfe’s show The Edge of Holding unfurls itself in nine jewel-box instalments. Each is an oil painting that evokes landscape, or maybe evokes the kinds of things we sense in response to the natural world—think light, temperature, texture, weather, times of day, and night.

Though they are all distinct, the paintings are formally related, with kindred compositions, structures, and linework. The hang highlights such connections, placing works that share palettes or forms alongside or across from one another, creating a sense of rhythm throughout the space. On entering, however, I am struck by the imbalance of white wall to canvas. Rolfe’s paintings are not small (most are close to a metre along each of their lengths), but their setting, at first, makes them feel so. Sprawling like voids between Rolfe’s paintings, the white walls’ blankness threatens to deaden rather than hold the gallery’s quiet and dampen the works’ sensory evocations.

I pause. As soon as I take the time to really look at these works my doubt is soon assuaged. These paintings have presence. And not just presence, warmth. Enough that the white walls fall away and I am left with just the paintings and the portals they offer—to places, sensations: hot light, frigid water, leaf mould that smells like autumn. Or how soft the darkness feels just before moonrise.

On entry, to my left, From Afar occupies a corner of the room. At just over one metre high and eighty centimetres wide, it is the size of a small window and has just this effect. Positioned (as all the works are) at eye height, the canvas reaches down to my upper thigh as I approach it, engulfing my torso in its space: from a band of transparent duck egg blue—a kind of sill that grounds the composition—Rolfe builds a series of tessellated hillocks in shades that range from dove grey to rose. A few linear flashes of icy blue striate the central area of the work, accompanied occasionally by a stripe of warm yellow contrast. In the upper section, an undulating brushstroke in charcoal traces a ridgeline, its silhouette set off by a swathe of cloudy pearl that rests above. Looking like the sky, this swathe encroaches slowly downwards, below and into the work. Along with the ridgeline, it instances the landscape resonance of this painting with subtle assuredness.

Other works share this segmented composition and share in turn the landscape possibility such an arrangement of space and depth promises. On the far end wall my beacon from the corridor, And Wandering Through, iterates this spatial delineation in an array of butter and gold, interspersed with cool water tones. On the right-hand wall, about halfway down the space, As We Greet the Day does it too, in rich apricot and sandstone. Connecting these works to others like Nourished, Each Winter, and With the Early Mist (which are flatter and without the same segmentation to evoke depth) is Rolfe’s use of sinuous, organic linework; wide brushstrokes deliver languorous arcs and dips of pigment that glance over and around the forms beneath. These moving lines in turn breathe motion into her compositions without unsettling them; many have a serene energy, but few are still. Those that are, like In the Blue Earth of the Sky and Again do convey a more restful atmosphere, also aided by their lower-keyed palettes: deep purples, starlit lilac, and midnight blue in the case of the former; soft forest green, compost brown, and refreshing glances of celeste in the latter.

I am surprised by how, in all of Rolfe’s vivid, flowing works, I find invitations to rest. Not because they offer blankness (as in the way of white walls), or immediate satisfaction (as in the way of a digital image, searched and instantly found), but because they are involving. Each rewards slow-looking; subtler shades appear, textures reveal themselves and different shapes coalesce. The longer I look, the more I see, the more I feel. I keep looking.

This capacity to accrue rather than lose complexity over time is due to Rolfe’s control of her medium—she builds form, vibrancy, and tactility through delicate tonal washes that shift from opaque to translucent as I move towards each work. In Turning, With Every Tide, hung on the left-hand wall, the barest of pigmented layers add detailed gradation to what is a stronger, more angular composition. Close to the bottom of the work, a slightly conical area of canvas is treated with a whispering cinnamon wash; you can see the waves of application, Rolfe’s loading and unloading pigment off her brush. Much of this canvas holds denser colour, but there are a handful of these transparent tidal forms, some in ocean blue, others in bottle green, each a tactile secret that draws you closer in.

Though all dated to 2026, these nine paintings mark a year of dedicated practice for Rolfe, an early-career artist who believes in slow-making. Rather than radical and swift impositions onto her linen supports, Rolfe gives her paintings time to form, pausing between additions and using these notes of temporal rest as central compositional devices. Speaking to me from her own nature-break in Tasmania, Rolfe describes how she “didn’t want to overwork” these more recent paintings: “I would come back to them (…) think a little bit (…) (I was) very conscious of taking time with that.” This attention to process has seen Rolfe develop her work from those shown in her first exhibition at ARC ONE in 2024, where structure was conveyed as much through her impasto application as through form, and very little through line. Here, her subtler touch is evident. In Rolfe’s more recent paintings it is as though a waft of air has blown through, dusted them off and lifted them up; they have an aliveness that feels more assured, less dug in than it did before.

But why cast these works as “almost-abstract”? Though they are far from figurative, the compositional depth and occasional horizon line in Rolfe’s paintings have the effect of positioning me in relation to them, rather than enforcing a detachment between us. Even in works without spatial delineation, Rolfe’s paintings rarely depart into pure abstraction, by which I mean hardly any (only the work Again did this for me) sever a representational relationship between our world and what the forms on the canvas speak of or around. This does not amount to Rolfe’s paintings straightforwardly depicting landscape, but, as Chelsea Hopper describes in her exhibition essay, sees the artist taking nature as a “set of conditions” that realise her works more as environments than views. The day before she spoke to me, Rolfe had made a return visit to Cradle Mountain—her thrill is palpable: “it was so windy and it was wild (…) it’s so beautiful (…) and different every time.” Rolfe tells me how hiking and being in nature are central inspirations for her practice. From the “incredible textures” of rocks and leaves to vast mountain views, and the overwhelming sensation of simply “being in the cold,” these experiential qualities are where her works derive their sensory possibility and appeal.

Along with her colours and textures, Rolfe’s poetic titles ground my explorations—through the lenses they offer it is hard not to see and feel shifting clouds, wafting breeze, or swirling sea moving across these canvases. For me, they have the effect of morphing into embodied landscapes that I have met and hold close, or some I have, until now, rarely recalled: at the beach where the river meets the sea; looking through a window at the north country dales washed clean after rain; clambering along a rocky mountain path with wildflowers in full, glorious bloom. You will have different recollections and responses to these works, but their quiet power is how Rolfe’s precise and careful mark-making have created compositions with breadth and appeal that can simultaneously turn into each viewer’s private world. Given a little time, most works do this for me: they drop through my cluttered memories, pick one up, polish it off; and rather than present me with a snapped polaroid view, instead they offer a feeling of being there with a sparkle of clarity.

This capacity to take us somewhere tangible (through looking like how something feels like, through movement, evoked temperatures, scents) is why many of Rolfe’s paintings tread the line—or hold the edge—of abstraction. It is also how they offer our senses some reprieve, eliciting them back from dead-end screens and machines where shape, space and time compress into pure surface.