Solo Exhibition: 30 September - 22 November, 2026
Opening Event: Saturday 3 October, 2-4pm
Fran O'Neill paints largely without a brush. Her hand, her arm, the sweeping gesture that imparts a geode-like language that washes across the canvas, the paint moved by the body, across a surface primed to let it glide. Colour is pre-mixed, then laid down and coaxed until something surfaces: an uneasy truce between chance and control, where, sometimes, a painting emerges as if simply waiting for permission, and sometimes resolves only once it has nearly failed.
These canvases hold that tension. Serpentine sweeps of oil catch and shimmer, pause and release. Unlikely colours meet and, against reason, settle. Passages are left untamed; a mark falls back into depth.
'Closer, Still' gathers work made in Cheshunt, Victoria over the past three years. The paintings, drawing on both O’Neill’s current regional Australian context and a long-running Brooklyn-based practice, ask only to be lived with, not overthought, just met again and again as light shifts through rooms, and seasons play with the weight of the air, revealing themselves by degrees. Movement, always: of paint, of perception, of a surface that never quite sits still.
