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Just a week prior to stepping her foot into At The Above, Kayleigh participated in a week-long workshop in Fowlers Gap, 110km north of Broken Hill (NSW). After immersion in regenerative agriculture through the artist’s lens, a conversation began on how to shift the way the fragile landscape is managed and on raising the importance of its current state to a national issue.

Her works are never one-dimensional - a bilateral harmony of bold and muted colours, soft and sharp lines, rough and smooth edges.

At The Above, April 2022. Fitzroy, VIC

‘(Internal) Rivers’ is an instinctual and necessary collection. Each work documents the unknotting of specific emotions, a search for clarity in a feeling, and the artist’s untangling of both significant change and slow static days. 

A body is heavy with intention. The way they support, hold, pull apart and ache as our environment changes is a consequential response, it is mostly silent. A constant bounce between joy and despair. 

The creation of this work came from the artist’s willingness to let herself flow, to be carried into work that gives way to true feeling – a relinquishing of control and the expectation to resolve conflict. They are a gathering of things both soft and chaotic, hard and beautiful. 

Each painting demanded the artist give in and permit her body to work through complicated emotions. The hostile easing to soft in Gentle as Time Falls Apart, the tender cut of colour in It’s Not A Sad Thing moves towards acceptance. 

By breaking from the rigid expectations of self, (Internal) Rivers is a reflection of what it means to create from a place of empathy for your own intentions, to be loose, vivid and spontaneous, the artist’s understanding of her own despair and great joy, and how to make and move forward. 

No Vacancy Gallery, Melbourne, VIC June 2021

Words by Laura Stortenbecker

Selected Works: ARCHIVE

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