At first glance, Dalin Alejandrino’s work draws you in through colour and movement – soft layers, gentle textures and a measured sense of calm, developed in her home studio on Gadigal and Wangal Country, Sydney. To understand her practice more fully is to recognise how heritage and identity move beneath the surface, informing her work through sensitivity, restraint and a steady, considered presence.

Born in the Khao I Dang refugee camp on the Thai–Cambodian border, Dalin began her life amid displacement following her parents’ escape from Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. Her family resettled in Australia in 1987. While history exists within her paintings, it does not arrive as overt narrative but as atmosphere – something sensed, absorbed and carefully held.

Creativity was instinctive from an early age, though her path initially moved through a corporate communications career. It was during early motherhood that she returned to painting, with the studio becoming a place of recalibration and quiet focus. In 2025, Dalin presented her first solo exhibition, Introspection, followed by the group exhibition Quiet Tide, showcased at Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

Across her bodies of work, she explores identity and self-reclamation through wind-swept gestures and layered mark-making. Colour and texture accumulate slowly, moving through subconscious memory and expansive, landscape-like forms that trace an ongoing negotiation between stillness and motion, control and release.