Alexandra Peters' first major institutional solo exhibition, "The Graven Image," is currently on display at The Warrnambool Art Gallery through October 19, 2025. The ambitious show brings together large-scale works that blend printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation, featuring repurposed gas pipes and canisters as supports, banquet tables draped in heavy pleated leatherette, and gestural canvases that challenge traditional gallery spaces.

The exhibition takes its title from the biblical concept of graven images, which refers to the long-standing suspicion of idolatry in Abrahamic religions where images are viewed cautiously due to their ability to collapse spiritual transcendence into material form. However, Peters' work is less concerned with traditional representation than with examining the structural foundations that support both painting and broader cultural and industrial systems.

Set in Peters' hometown of Warrnambool, often called the Shipwreck Coast due to its treacherous and tragic coastline, the exhibition draws deep connections to the local landscape and history. The region is built around Tower Hill, a volcanic crater whose chocolate soils formed thirty thousand years ago and now serve as the foundation of Warrnambool's identity as a dairy and cattle capital. For the indigenous Gunditjmara people, these volcanic plains sustained one of the world's oldest aquaculture systems, while for European settlers, they became the foundation of pastoral expansion and colonial wealth.

The gallery's permanent collection features Eugene von Guérard's "Tower Hill" (1855), an oil painting depicting the nearby volcanic crater that has long anchored both the gallery's collection and the town's cultural memory. In the 1960s and 70s, this canvas took on new significance when conservationists and Gunditjmara custodians used its meticulous botanical details as a visual archive to guide the replanting of native vegetation. The painting transformed from a romantic landscape into a functional infrastructure for environmental restoration.

Peters' exhibition creates a striking contrast to von Guérard's work. Where the 19th-century painting reconciles a site of violent geological rupture into pictorial stability, presenting wholeness where there is actually a crater cavity, Peters' installations insist on precarity and instability. Her works stage painting as a structure perpetually at risk of collapse, with supports exposed, surfaces fractured, and marks oscillating between control and dispersal.

The centerpiece installation, "Foreign Line Extraction V (Overture)" (2025), features a length of green steel gas pipe sealed with open cell foam that stretches almost the full width of the gallery. The pipe rests upon "Polity (Latent State)" (2025), an oversized rectangular table cushioned and skirted in pleated leatherette with funeral-like heaviness. Unlike Peters' previous installation at ACCA for the 2024 Macfarlane Commissions, where pipes appeared to belong to the gallery's architecture, here the pipe is conspicuously disconnected from any functional system.

The gallery's existing vinyl coin-tile flooring becomes part of the artwork itself, reclaimed by Peters as "Leg over Leg III" (2025), emphasizing the exhibition's site-specific nature and rootedness in Warrnambool. The surgical green walls and unnerving leatherette pleats create an almost military environment that suggests both antiseptic cleanliness and corpse-like rest, while simultaneously evoking banquet tables and histories of ritual feasting.

Two explosive paintings, "Sunset Clause" (2025) and "Midnight Hammer" (2025), provide dramatic counterpoints to the installation's restraint. "Sunset Clause" is an abstract-expressionist triptych awash in crimson and black, with vigorous gestural sweeps of black paint cutting across screen-printed white layered forms. The title carries legal weight, invoking agreements that expire after fixed periods, while the violent brushwork suggests catastrophic collision between painterly expression and industrial marking.

"Midnight Hammer" draws its title from Operation Midnight Hammer, the code name for U.S. Air Force and Navy strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities during the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June 2025. The searing diptych frames midnight blue and incandescent red, with intensity partially obscured by sweeping drips and stains of black. The painting operates through a frame-within-a-frame construction, where an eruptive center suggesting volatility and combustion is enclosed by a darker navy border that imposes order and restraint.

Between these two paintings sits "Polity (Mid-state)" (2025), a sculptural installation featuring a capped pipe cemented atop a round table draped in pleated leatherette, with legs upholstered with black gas canisters. Upon closer inspection, the sculpture reveals screen-printed United Nations seals, which in the context of ongoing conflicts reads less as a guarantor of justice than as a hollowed-out symbol stripped of authority.

"Common Seal" (2025) most directly references Warrnambool's local industries by taking the form of an enlarged butcher's or deli meat ticket - those disposable slips that regulate service order. Fabricated in imitation leather and steel, the pale mint surface blends with the gallery's green walls while alphanumeric codes and motifs puncture its neutrality. The work monumentalizes everyday consumer infrastructure, transforming it into something both ceremonial and strange.

The exhibition successfully reframes Peters' practice with incisive force, revealing not only the haunted residues of local and global industry but also the unstable grounds upon which painting itself must stand. Set against Warrnambool's volcanic landscapes, shipwreck histories, and economies of extraction, "The Graven Image" operates as a threshold where instability is held open and the invisible can be depicted without being contained. The show runs through October 19, 2025, at The Warrnambool Art Gallery.