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Winter in Tasmania has many facades. In less than fifteen minutes the weather can reveal the tumultuous clouds of an icy southern storm and mimic the brilliant sunshine of an Edenic paradise. Five minutes later, the air threatens to snap into a swirling white symphony of frosty jewels. Fleeting moments of every season filter through each day as winter dances an unpredictable tango of rain, sleet and sunshine. Silvery grey smoke from a multitude of roaring wood fires settles over Hobart when the air is still, while the city's silent sentinel, Mt Wellington, endures another onslaught of snow. A lonely wind whistles its lament through the bare branches of trees that flank the shores of the white capped Derwent River and twilight is bathed in a faint pink light, heralding the advance of a bitter darkness waiting to embrace the city with needle-like fingers that slip through every street and crack in the pavement. Merciless and tempestuous, the forceful changeability of winter in Tasmania possesses a haunting beauty and luminous reverence unique to the isolated island. The collection of images in Hood evoked the essence of winter. In this exhibition of recent work, Tray Ruffels offered a graceful insight into the majestic splendour of the sublime Tasmanian landscape . Observing and photographing the patterns and reflections of the surrounding environment as it was mirrored in the glossy surface of a car bonnet, Ruffels utilised this technique to illuminate the fine details of nature. From the ghostly silhouettes of spiny trees to the pastel brilliance of a sunrise, the photographs were reproduced as a series of large scale ink jet prints on canvas. The result was a sophisticated blend of natural