SIX MOONS & THE EVENT HORIZON – Sept, 2024
Chambers Art Gallery, Christchurch
Acrylic on panel, framed, 510 x 405 x 30mm
Acrylic on panel, framed, 510 x 405 x 30mm
Acrylic on panel, framed, 510 x 405 x 30mm
Acrylic on panel, framed, 510 x 405 x 30mm
Acrylic on panel, framed, 510 x 405 x 30mm
Acrylic on panel, framed, 510 x 405 x 30mm
You like circles huh?
Two older women
Their curiosity questioning and final
Sydney Biennale 2024
White Bay Power Station
An industrial building
Enormous, clambering
Concrete and steel
Polished and ready
Inside, barely through the door, I meet
A hole –
Mid-height, black, dinner plate size
A portal connecting one room to another
The surrounding plaster
Painted and repainted
100 years.
Six Moons, a series inspired by my photos of this hole. Clean and dusty, the hole was blackness eternal. The edges, felted, escaping, gasses of an Event Horizon.
Event Horizon
The area around the edge of a black hole where everything we know ceases to exist.
Yeah, I guess I like circles.
FIGURE & GROUND – March, 2024
McAtamney Gallery, Geraldine
In the evocative series Figure and Ground, Kim Hennessy presents a bold juxtaposition of form and space, where the vivacity of flowers is cast against the stark simplicity of opaque grounds. Through her adept manipulation of contour lines—thick, thin, light, dark, hesitant, fluid, strong, vulnerable—Hennessy delineates the boundaries of existence, both questioning and asserting the place of natural beauty in a fabricated realm. The graphic line quality in her work, a direct evidence of the artist’s hand, adds a layer of intimacy to the pieces, inviting the viewer to traverse the emotional landscape embedded within each stroke.
Hennessy’s choice of solid, pop-like colours in the backgrounds does not merely serve as a foil to the sculptural flowers that command attention in the foreground; these choices resonate with a deeper inquiry into what it means to stand alone, unanchored by the usual contexts that define or confine. The flowers, rendered with a statuesque quality, require no support to assert their presence. They are singular entities, each arrangement floating in a vacuum, cut out from their domestic scenes like collages, creating a visual tension that is both unsettling and liberating.
The lack of shadows in Hennessy’s compositions further accentuates this sense of detachment, the flowers and their vibrant hues suspended in an indeterminate space that feels both nowhere and everywhere. This deliberate choice challenges the viewer to confront the flowers on their own terms, as entities that are simultaneously present and absent, vibrant yet isolated. This intimate quality is further explored with closely cropped passages of the paintings produced on hand made ceramic plates.
Figure and Ground is an invitation to explore the paradoxes of visibility and existence, where Kim Hennessy masterfully employs the language of flowers to narrate stories of beauty, isolation, and the innate human desire to belong. Through her striking use of colour, line, and form, Hennessy crafts a world where the ephemeral nature of flowers speaks to the enduring quest for meaning in an ever-shifting landscape.
TE WAI POUNAMU, WATER GREENSTONE – November 2022
Chambers Art Gallery, Christchurch
He said, his eyes shining, “ I’ve found it, it’s just over the hill”
So she packed her brushes and paint, her pregnant belly, and their cat
And that night she followed him over the hill
In the morning a bellbird woke her
Get up, come and see
So she went, along a warm path scented with pine needles
And looked out at golden clay arms cradling still jade water
And she thought
This will be a good home
ROCK POOL – March 2020
Chambers Art Gallery, Christchurch
Top 10 Exhibitions To Look Out For in March
(The Press, published 29 Feb 2020)
Kim Hennessy's paintings of rocks and mud pools are an appreciative reminder that painting at its best is a visual language all of its own.
Hennessy responds to the seemingly mundane realities of the world around us and extols the actuality of our experiences of life in painterly images reminiscent of American Bay Area painters from the 1950s, navigating the ambiguities of abstraction and the figurative.
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The idea for this exhibition began in 2019, after a long winter. I went in search of a place, an elephant garden, that would help me shift the cloak that winter had wrapped me in. Living in a country surrounded by sea I have walked beside water for all of my life. Above, below, and inside water has been an interest and a comfort.
The thing about water is that for a moment you are offered the chance to return to the daydream state of childhood. Water and the places where water lives became the focus of my work for the last year. I discovered places where water asked me to step forward and rest my hand in the salty warmth of a rock pool. I found places that were quiet with damp grey mud. I gazed into transparent pools where rocks lurked ghostlike beneath the surface, and I felt fear at the churning water lapping around the bottom of blackened jetty poles.
Using paint, ceramic, broken bus stop glass and charcoal, which have been pushed, pulled and heated to 1200C. I have created individual works that are bonded together by water.
THE ROSE SHOW – March 2019
Governors Bay Gallery
Roses made in Winter
Reminding us of long darkness and forever rain
Washing being shifted three times
And still damp to the touch
Roses made in winter
Represent a lot of things
And yet here they are
Woollen Soft Fragile Romantic
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The winter roses are made from lint collected from the dryer during the winter of 2018. They are the residue of life and of the constant hum of the dryer in my home which sees no sun between May and September.
Each rose was so profoundly expectant, the waiting and the collecting, so full of anticipation. Wrapped like cloaks, surprises of greys and blacks; stuff, melded together, the detritus of life.
Photography acts as a record, a protective layer, a more permanent documentation of a material that is normally discarded and ephemeral.
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20% of sales was given to the victims of Mosque Shootings, Christchurch 2019.
SUMMER HORSES – October 2015
Amuri Gallery, Hanmer Springs
The Summer Horse series developed over a couple of years and combined drawing the figure with painting. The use of board as a firm surface enhanced the technique of scumbling, in which the brush is deliberately pushed into the board, producing a unique texture, highlighting the layers beneath.
In searching for the form of the horse the line is found rather than depicted. The line is not a continuous ribbon but rather comes in and out of existence, being formed from an aggregate of layers below and above, from spaces within and without.
This manner of working inherently involves an investigation into the figure and ground dynamic where the ground is as important as the figure. It is the gestalt; the whole is more than the sum of its parts; line, ground, figure, form, space, colour, texture – all move together.