Kiran McKinnon | Cloudbreak: {Suite} Ponsonby

The works in this exhibition offer a snapshot of several facets of my practice - large scale sprayed works, smaller playful pieces, and soft and subtle inky surfaces of paint, soaked deep into the canvas ground. Linking them all are my use of unprimed canvas and linen, and my use of dilute acrylic paints soaked, stained, and sprayed into my fabric surfaces. Broadly speaking painting for me is always an investigation of pictorial space, creating movement and light in and across the picture plane and playing with the illusions of depth. Light and colour play across the surface of a canvas, as they play across our fields of vision.

These works are also multi-layered responses and reflections on our relationship with the world and how we feel in it. They’re about those moments of being immersed in experience, both small and personal and more expansive. The sublime beauty of the sky at sunrise or sunset. The small quiet perfect beauty of daphne flowers in winter. The play of light on water. The luminosity of colours at dusk on an evening walk. The sky, the sky, the sky. There’s also the suggestion of the freedom that comes with change. The lines of flight that appear when we start to look for them. The ways the world will call us home to ourselves.

The exhibition title ‘Cloudbreak’ brings to mind that moment when sunlight breaks through an overcast sky. And the little sparks that keep us going in sorrow; little cracks that let the light in.