N G Malla

NG Malla’s art practice focuses primarily on urban and domestic landscapes; particularly homes and residential neighbourhoods. She is interested in the mundane, seemingly ordinary houses and streetscapes across Australia’s inner city, suburban and country towns, seeking to capture the subtle insights suggested by the exteriors of homes and gardens and the assumptions we may make about their occupants. Through her ‘house portraits’, she explores how the iconic residential architecture of each period – from the ‘colonial’ cottage; Victorian terrace; Federation bungalow; to the mid century fibro and beyond – evokes personal nostalgia as the domestic settings for our own pasts as well as their testimony to now ambiguous and unresolved periods in Australia’s social and economic history. The strong visual language associated with each architectural style – from

windows and roof pitches to building materials and colours – and their interactions with Australian native vegetation, exotic species, and intense sunlight – lend character and meaning to our residential streets and suburbs. Her domestic interiors and still life paintings continue this interest with the Australian home and the ways in which our interior rooms and objects echo people or place – from the floral patterning on a living room sofa to the glimpses of garden through a window or a bunch of native flowers. Her ‘Lismore’ series of house portraits evoke the nostalgia arising from memories of her home

town as well as the wider collective sorrow and loss in the wake of the devastating 2022 floods.

NG Malla resumed painting in 2019 after raising her four children. Since that time she has been a finalist in the Greenway Art Prize (2021, 2022); the Waverley Woollahra 9x5 competition (2022), the

Hunters Hill Art Prize (2022) and the Blacktown Art Prize (2022). She has also exhibited as part of the Saywell Gallery, Marrickville ‘That Place’ group exhibition; and the 2022 Bendigo Bank Leichhardt

Greenway Art Prize Popup exhibition. She was part of a series of early 1990s solo and group exhibitions: 1992 Window Gallery, Chippendale; 1992 Green Iguana Café, Newtown (solo exhibition);

and 1991, 1992; Sidhartha Art Gallery, Kathmandu, Nepal (Group exhibitions).