Jacqueline Hennessy 'The night, this garden of light'

‘This night, this garden of light’ is Jacqueline Hennessy’s second solo exhibition with Jan Murphy Gallery. Hennessy’s feminine figures offer themselves to our gaze, conditionally: a body, a gesture, the minutiae of fabric or hair — faces are rare. Hennessy builds her images slowly over time, transparent washes of raw umber are gently painted onto linen then disrupted by overbrushing. There is a quiet, ghostly quality to the rendering - the sepia palette hinting at visions remembered, rather than wholly of this time. In This night, this garden of light, Hennessy continues to use her body in a performative way to explore the tension between the private and public self.

“My process involves playing between binary opposites to create a tension between appearance and disappearance, painted and unpainted, detail and blur.” – Jacqueline Hennessy, 2023

Hennessy graduated with a Masters of Fine Art (Painting) from Sydney’s National Art School in 2019. Before studying art she worked as a lawyer, then completed her Honours degree in Psychology. Hennessy was the inaugural recipient of the Tweed Regional Gallery – National Art School MFA Residency Award in 2019. The award enabled Hennessy to spend time in Gallery’s Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio, the resulting body of work ‘Still Life’ was exhibited at Tweed Regional Gallery in 2021.