This body of work explores the theme of darkness visible with a series of paintings and drawings. The works respond to the spectacle of artificial light, fire, lightning and moon light on night time landscapes: the Illawarra escarpment, the sea, campsites, parklands, headlands and its coastline.

The exhibition speaks of how a light source, its shadows and reflections, can be mysterious and fluid, revealing the often unexpected beauty and poetry of these places at nightfall.

“Cherish the dark” by Michele Elliot

Vyvian Wilson’s NIGHTFALL, new works from the dark, Clifton School of Arts, 2026

As a child, darkness, for me, was both terrifying and exhilarating. I grew up in the suburbs, where on those unbearably hot summer nights, we were allowed to drag out blankets and pillows to the backyard and make beds on the grass. Dad’s torch, cheese sandwiches, the old thermos. The dog, who usually slept in the cubby, tail wagging, waiting for us to arrange our nest eat the food run inside turn off the porch light and finally flop down, came and lay beside us. Stretched out on our backs chit chat laughing chit chat giggling until we stopped. The black velvet sky opening deepening magnifying and shrinking our small limbs spread out in wonder. The stars the stars glinting winking blinking sending secret messages.

The immeasurable exquisite infinite.

Vyv Wilson’s new work is an invitation to step inside the infinite, to peer into the darkness, to look deeply. Not only to look, but to imagine. Storm, ocean, forest, cloud, cliff, sky. The street, the park. The dark that enfolds us and the light that reveals what the night holds. The quiet lights, reflections, the moon and stars in the shifting night sky, campfire, the flash of lightning and the interventionist streetlamps, headlights, neons, the glow from a faraway city, all part of how we comprehend the night.

Wilson’s Nightfall series of elemental paintings and drawings encompasses dreamy speculations of darkness. The depth of pictorial space emerges through resonant stains and spills that hold the dark in congregations of light. Flickering lines and fugitive marks are transitory, pools of brightness become portals into the nocturnal realm of ‘intimate immensity’.

Wilson’s practice sits in this space of the in between. Embodied and responsive, her artworks unfurl from a depth of memory and emotion. She attends to her world, on Wodi Wodi Country. The sea, the escarpment, the bush, the roads, the open spaces; noticing, recording, remembering. And then returns to the work in the studio, where her gatherings are slowly and skilfully transformed into material objects. The looping back and forth between stillness and movement, between immersion and solitude, creates a bridge that spans the notion of intimate immensity. She invites us to find quiet in darkness for ourselves, to go outside and feel the wonder of the child.

Night pollution is everywhere and increasing. And while growing ‘constellations’¹ of satellites orbit the globe, the Dark Sky² movement is also growing.

Nightfall is a poetic entreaty, a timely reminder that we must truly cherish the dark.

Michele Elliot is a visual artist, educator and occasional writer living and working on Wodi Wodi Country.

¹ As of June 2026, SpaceX has launched over 10,000 Starlink satellites. Yes, they are called ‘constellations’. More are planned.

² Dark Sky communities in Australia: https://darksky.org/locations/australia/