Exhibition - Sun Path 2026
Arrow/cycle/light, acrylic on birch wood panel, 60 × 70 cm, 2026
Sun Path
Claire Mooney
Opening Night: Friday 10th April 6 - 9pm
Exhibition Dates: Friday 10th April - Saturday 2nd May 2026
Open Wed - Sat 12 - 5pm
Five Walls Project Space 3
1/119 Hopkins Street, Footscray, Melbourne
https://fivewalls.com.au/
A sun path traces the journey of the sun as it moves across the sky. As seasons pass, this arc shifts, and intersections between light and material objects change. This path marks cycles of time and light; mapping and informing our orientation to ourselves and our lives.
The new paintings and textiles in Sun Path map a period of continuing and evolving trajectories.
The works in this exhibition explore recurring concepts and themes of practice; the interplay of geometric pattern and colour, and how processes of fragmentation, layering and interweaving allow forms to merge and emerge.
Within this, there is a new shift towards the materiality of the surface, and an investigation into the varying densities and luminosities of colour that can be generated by paint, thread and textiles.
Hard-edge sensibilities are retained, yet an amplified textural and optical language is embraced in the layered mark-making of brushstrokes and stitches. Colours and forms can reveal more of their histories and the traces of their making, and sequences of decisions remain visible, both dissolving and defining form. Through this insistent physicality, colour as an embodiment of light is felt as much as it is seen.
The colours in these works have also been shaped by personal experiences of sun, light, and colour in recent years; an extraordinary journey travelling north, inhabiting a different place and seeing in a different way; the more prosaic routine of cycling to work in the early mornings, riding head on into the sunrise, my face stunned by gold light.
Together, these artworks begin to explore visual and conceptual resonances between the material practices of painting and textiles, and reflect a renewed, embodied awareness of space, time, colour and light in nature.
(Claire Mooney - Artist Statement - Sun Path 2026)
