There is something fitting about a painter known for capturing the subtlety of skin tones and the play of light on still objects finding herself on the deck of a pearl lugger, watching the Kimberley sun move across water. Adelaide artist Tsering Hannaford is Paspaley’s 2026 artist in residence, and her time in Australia’s remote northwest has already begun to shape new work.
The residency, now in its second year, invites Australian artists to spend time with the Paspaley family and crew, travelling aboard the pearl luggers that work the waters off Broome and the Kimberley coast. It is an immersive experience: days on the water, nights under vast skies, and access to the pearl farms and remote landscapes that define this part of the country.
For Hannaford, whose work has long been concerned with light, texture and the quiet intensity of her subjects, the residency offers something new. Her studio practice in Adelaide is meticulous and controlled. The Kimberley is anything but. The light shifts constantly. The scale is immense. The pearling industry itself carries a weight of history and labour that sits alongside the natural beauty.
An Adelaide lineage
Hannaford’s name will be familiar to many South Australians. Her father, Robert Hannaford, is one of the country’s most celebrated portrait painters, known for his unflinching realism and his commissioned portraits of prime ministers, scientists and everyday Australians. He works from a studio in the Adelaide Hills, where Tsering grew up surrounded by the rhythms of a working artist’s life.
That upbringing shaped her approach. Hannaford trained formally at the Adelaide Central School of Art and has since built a reputation for her own distinctive work, including portraits, figurative studies and still life paintings that balance precision with emotional depth. She has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize and has shown widely in Australian galleries
But the Paspaley residency asks something different of her. Rather than working from a controlled studio environment, she has been responding to place in real time, sketching and painting aboard the boats, absorbing the colours and textures of a landscape that shifts hour by hour.
Pearls, place and painting
Paspaley is Australia’s oldest and largest producer of South Sea pearls, and the family’s connection to the Kimberley runs deep. The residency programme is part of a broader commitment to arts patronage, but it also reflects something of the Paspaley ethos: that the pearls themselves are shaped by place, and that artists might find something valuable in experiencing that place firsthand.
Previous resident artists have responded to the residency in different ways. Hannaford’s work from the Kimberley is still emerging, but early pieces suggest a fascination with the interplay of water, sky and the weathered surfaces of the boats themselves. There is also an interest in the people who work the pearl farms, the divers and crew whose labour is rarely seen by those who eventually wear the pearls.
See the work in Adelaide
Hannaford’s residency work will be shown at the Paspaley boutique on King William Street in Adelaide, bringing a piece of the Kimberley to South Australian audiences. For those who know her father’s portraits or have followed her own career, it is an opportunity to see an artist working outside her usual environment, responding to something vast and unfamiliar.
It is also a reminder of the depth of artistic talent in South Australia, and the ways that patronage programmes like Paspaley’s can support artists to take risks and grow. Hannaford is an accomplished painter with a distinctive eye. The Kimberley has given her something new to look at.
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