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.