Artists, Alice, Sophie and Lucy Pulvers, team up for new exhibition Sisters at Aarwun Gallery

Bringing together the work of Alice, Sophie and Lucy Pulvers, the exhibition - aptly titled Sisters - sees the siblings combine their individual artistic languages in one show.

The sisters were all born and raised in Japan, before relocating to Canberra in their teenage years, and each found that time abroad heavily influenced not only their initial interests in visual arts but helped shape their own artistic voices.

"We found that the visual arts education in our primary school, and in Japan in general, was very taken very seriously. We even studied calligraphy as part of our school curriculum," Lucy Pulvers says.

"I think that might have had something awakened something in us, but we were always drawing and painting from a very young age.

"And when we were, just out of high school, we started to realise that this had become the most important thing in our lives. And all the work that we've been doing had actually made us into artists."

It's interesting how the works fit together within the exhibition.

On the surface - and particularly when the works are viewed separately from each other - the sisters have very distinctive styles. But by combining a large selection of their works for Sisters, it is possible to discern the commonalities between them

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Alice Pulvers' work centres around architecture, and while there may be people depicted in the imagery, the focus is still on the buildings. And since Alice Pulvers lives in the capital, the keen observer might be able to pick out which Canberra buildings feature in the artworks.

Following high school, Sophie Pulvers went on to do a degree in environmental science at the University of New South Wales. And that same interest in the natural world shows in her artwork, with a lot of pieces focusing on animals, insects and marine life.

Meanwhile, Lucy Pulvers' artwork is all figurative, while also combining geometry, colour and mood.

"It's a big exhibition - there'll be over 130 paintings - but we each wanted to choose what we felt best represented us," Lucy Pulvers says.

"We wanted the world to see who we are as artists, we wanted everyone to see the essence of who we are as artists."

But while the subject matter is so diverse, there are common threads. Similar to the siblings themselves, while they are all different, there are traces of where they - or in this case, their artistic interest - came from.

"Our styles just sort of naturally evolved. We never made a conscious decision to paint differently or anything like that. But just the way we develop naturally," Lucy Pulvers says.

"But I do think we share something and that's probably the colour and the composition.

"That was most probably because growing up, we were, in a way we were different in Japan because we weren't Japanese. So we always played with each other and drew and painted with each other."

Sisters is at Aarwun Gallery from Thursday until May 15.

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