Exhibition: 'Over the Fence'

In Over the Fence, Margaret MacIntosh continues her ongoing series of streetscape paintings. These unfiltered and strikingly familiar images drift along the edges of routine geographies—quiet streets, trimmed hedges, identical facades —spaces that promise order, yet hum with the slow anxiety of accumulation. Over the Fence is a meditation on proximity and distance, on the quiet theatre of suburban life, and on the overflow of what can no longer be contained.

Margaret explains that “these paintings emerge from movement: walking, driving, glimpsing. They trace the rhythms of shifting light across surfaces built to hide as much as they reveal. The suburb is not a passive backdrop, but an active stage—where shadows stretch across driveways, rubbish piles at the curb, and repetition becomes uncanny. I'm interested in what surfaces in the in-between: between visibility and concealment, containment and collapse.”

In 2024, Margaret was the winner of the inaugural Becker Minty Exhibition Award at the esteemed Paddington Art Prize. She holds a Masters of Art Therapy from Latrobe University and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from The Victorian College of the Arts where she was awarded the Maude Glover Fleay Award. Over the last 15 years, she has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibition across Australia, and undertaken residencies both at home and abroad.