When artist Nerrida Parfitt sees a house ablaze with light, she imagines an entire universe inside its four walls.
The windows are its eyes, the roof, the bricks, the glow and the shadows represent its unseen inhabitants.
The oil painter has long been taken with homes and abandoned buildings in country towns, capturing them in what she considers portraits rather than landscapes.
"Houses have so many lives," she tells AAP from her home and studio in Ballarat, in Victoria's central highlands.
"They could have had multiple families living in them and lost stories and journeys.
"They're living things themselves."
Dilapidated and abandoned buildings that dot the landscape are also a source of fascination.
"There's almost some sadness in some of them, but there's a lot of beauty in there too," Parfitt said.
"Things that seem forgotten and are of the past, they've got a lot of presence to them still."
Parfitt, who has recently exhibited at Brunswick Street Gallery in Fitzroy and The Corner Store Gallery in Orange, grew up on the outskirts of Melbourne, a place that felt far from anywhere.
The outer suburb of Melton continues to influence her work, which explores the sometimes opposing themes of peace, impermanence and loneliness.
"Melton was considered a satellite city and it was just surrounded by flat grasslands and farms, so as a teen I felt like I was trapped," Parfitt said.
"It shapes my artistic direction, coming from such an isolated place."
Among her latest work is an evocative series on night driving, with red tail lights blurring into the horizon or head lights illuminating gnarled trees and leaning traffic signs.
A lone car is often the only witness to fleeting moments of beauty in her work, like dusty pink clouds at sunset, a curtain of rain falling in the distance or sparkling puddles on a dirt road.
The work began when Parfitt and her partner, painter Peter Tankey, photographed the imposing concrete cross at a shrine on the highway outside Bacchus Marsh.
Under the night sky she began to think about the mixed emotions of driving on rural roads in the dark, a feeling likely familiar to those who traverse the vast Australian countryside.
"When you're on an isolated road, there's no traffic around and it's a really calm thing to do," Parfitt said.
"But then there's a fear that comes with that, being on an isolated road in the middle of nowhere, it's dark and you don't know what's in the shadows.
"I like that tension in my paintings, the light and the dark, the fear and the calm."
A friend of Parfitt's suggested her work could be Australia's own version of gothic, a juxtaposition to European religious tableaux, castles and cathedrals.
"Australia's got our own take on it all together, with the wide open roads that are isolated and scary.
"But they're also beautiful."
