Kellie Draft 2 by Jan Manton Gallery

ACloudNeverDies

Kellie O’Dempsey

21 January - 7 February 2025

I acknowledge the Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) and Jinibara peoples who are the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which these works were made. I pay respect to their Elders past, present and and emerging and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

A Cloud Never Dies

The title A Cloud Never Dies references and is attributed to the teachings of peace activist and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh who suggests that a cloud does not vanish but transforms—becoming rain, mist, or snow. This allegory of transformation resonates deeply for me, offering a framework for understanding loss as a process of perpetual change rather than disappearance. The work is the result of engaging with this continuity, attempting to record the transient beauty of the coast as a process to contemplate complexities of loss.

Continually concerned with the gestural and the experiential, my practice often seeks to capture the ephemeral—the temporality of experience. A Cloud Never Dies emerged during a period of personal loss and transformation. Through Plein-air watercolour painting, collage, and video projection, this exhibition navigates this shifting landscape. The act of recording the ever-changing skyscape became a ritual, often taking place at dusk— a time when the fading light amplified the urgency to record colour transitions in pigment and water as darkness took hold. While attempting to harness the instability of watercolour these transient moments became active meditations on impermanence and continuity.

Both obsessed and invigorated by mixing the colour shifts in real time, hues of pink and orange illuminated the sky for only a moment, storms formed and dispersed across the horizon, often with hues hard to measure while unpredictable watery pigments migrated and bloomed uncontrollably across my papers surface. The outcomes varied - from naturalistic representations to blurred suggestions from minimal abstractions and the introduction of additional elements emphasising the horizontal. An almost futile exercise, the work endeavoured to capture this atmospheric flux, I could not help drawing parallels between interior instability and the intensifying reality of climate crisis as I studied the sky. As extreme weather events continue to escalate, this observational practice increasingly interrogates notions of value—what is perceived, what is preserved, what is fleeting, and what must be protected.

Situated within (the loaded tradition of Western) landscape painting, in making these Plein-air works I returned to review the atmospheric studies of J.M.W. Turner, while simultaneously revisiting the immersive colour fields of Mark Rothko’s works on paper. The horizon line emerges as a recurring motif—a stabilizing force within a constantly shifting environment. It functions both as a boundary and a passage, connecting the visible and the unseen, the present and the absent. Hito Steyerl’s theory on the horizon line suggests that the horizon, once a stabilising reference point in both art and perception, has dissolved in contemporary times, reflecting a fractured perspective where boundaries between reality, illusion, and direction blur amid social, political, and environmental instability.

In the exhibition video projections and collaged elements further blur the distinction between reality and illusion, extending the watercolour studies into immersive, ephemeral spaces beyond borders. The interplay between light, colour, and movement echoes the fleeting nature of memory, reinforcing the transient presence of mortality.

Compelled to make this work, A Cloud Never Dies is both a responsive act managing personal grief and an ode to the magnificence of a coastal sky, offering broader meditations on impermanence, environmental fragility, and cycles of transformation. The work quietly calls for collective care—a recognition of the wonder of being present to cycles in the natural world.

Take care

Kellie O’Dempsey

Image credit - January Night, 2024, watercolour on paper, 74 x 53 cm. Photograph

by Carl Warner

Japanese Sunset

2024

watercolour on paper

58 x 76 cm

$750

Op page:

2025

watercolour on paper