Artist Profile: Neroli Needham
By the Bay Exhibition, Rose de Freycinet Gallery, 2026
Neroli Needham’s works reflect an obsession with capturing the Bay’s unique colour palette.
A highly technical artist proficient across multiple artistic disciplines, Needham chose to focus on glass and leadlight for By the Bay, translating the region’s distinctively flat topography with its bands of vibrant earth, sky and water tones into semi-abstract compositions of colour and line.
Her five pairs of works range from a duo of towering forms created almost entirely of rectangles, through more intimate hanging pieces incorporating increasingly organic curves and cut-outs, to two highly decorative circular compositions depicting the Shark Bay Daisy and dugongs respectively. Each pair of works mirrors each other, comprising a ‘Landlight’ of earth and sky, with brown tones merging into blue, and a contrasting ‘Sealight’ in which blue water merges into brown land.
Needham chose opaque rather than transparent glass because the material offers a wider range of colours and was the only choice in accurately reproducing the Bay’s distinctive palette.
The demands of the medium meant that Needham’s compositions had to be resolved early in the curatorial process, leaving the majority of her time to the complex construction of hundreds of individually cut pieces. The resulting works are luminous records not only of the Shark Bay landscape, but of the hundreds of hours of painstaking labour invested in their making.
Curated by Andrew Nicholls
Conceived by Shark Bay World Heritage Discovery & Visitor Centre,
Installed by Andrew Nicholls and Aiyana Wright
Project Managed by Julia Fenny
This project is delivered by the Shire of Shark Bay, and made possible through the Regional Arts Venue Support program managed by Western Australian State Government.
