Head to Fortitude Valley’s Jan Murphy Gallery until Saturday July 15 and peruse the works of Jacqueline Hennessy in This night, this garden of light. In her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Jacqueline’s  feminine figures offer themselves to our gaze, conditionally: a body, a gesture, the minutiae of fabric or hair — faces are rare. Hennessy builds her images slowly over time, transparent washes of raw umber are gently painted onto linen then disrupted by over brushing.

“My process involves playing between binary opposites to create a tension between appearance and disappearance, painted and unpainted, detail and blur.” Jacqueline says. There is a quiet, ghostly quality to the rendering – the sepia palette hinting at visions remembered, rather than wholly of this time. In This night, this garden of light, Hennessy continues to use her body in a performative way to explore the tension between the private and public self. “My paintings are self-portraits in the sense that they reference images of my body. However, unlike traditional self-portraiture, they are not concerned with realism in the sense of referencing an autobiographical expression of myself or my life. They do not seek to declare “this is me”.  Rather, they seek to evoke an ephemeral sense of how it feels to experience the world through the heart and through the sensuality of a female body.” Jacqueline says.

This exhibition is free for perusal – take a look at what to expect here.

Image credit: Jacqueline Hennessy, Untitled (fireworks and hurricanes), 2023, oil on linen, 91.5 x 102.0 cm
Image courtesy of Jan Murphy Gallery and Jacqueline Hennessy