Stanley Street Gallery presents Toni Messiter’s solo exhibition, It Was a Difficult Conversation, featuring 18 new paintings. A departure from her typical subject matter, It Was a Difficult Conversation turns to the environment, where Messiter considers the tree - beings who have memory and sensation - as protagonist. Unlike conventional landscape where the environment is a scene for the human, Messiter’s training in portraiture remains present with each tableau focusing on the mood of the tree. With a distinct gothic framework, the tree as protagonist is a clear continuation of the artist’s previous investigations of the subconscious and shadow. Messiter writes, “I left the foreground to move into the background”. Interested in the notions of haunting, she considers the subjectivity of nature, the shadows of the trees and asks us: what are the difficult conversations?