Amanda Penrose Hart, Hanging Weight, 2023. Oil on canvas, 122 x 152.5cm. Photography: Michael Bradfield. Courtesy: the artist and King Street Gallery on William, Sydney.

“From the beginning of 2023, Amanda Penrose Hart inhabited a house in Duffy’s Forest, Sydney that teeters above a timbered gully. Over summer, she observed the acrobatic insects, hovering, darting in and out of her space. She noted facts about them. She felt grateful to them for eating mosquitoes…Reading Tennyson’s poem about a dragonfly – a living flash of light – she fixed on the idea that an inner impulse would rend the veil of one’s old husk. She wanted that, as an artist.

…The paintings she worked on in the studio amidst the dragonflies were conceived in the open air. On the way to full realisation, they transformed from views of specific places into evocations of atmosphere. The clouds throughout are carefully placed, compositions forming and reforming on the canvas. While she made clouds from paint, Amanda thought about how real clouds enhance our lives, providing rain and shade, holding heat into the surface of the earth. As she painted permanent clouds, striving to evoke presence and immateriality at the same time, she thought about the changeability of real clouds, and of people. She thought about the inseparability of people and their so-called surroundings; we are never ‘out in the elements’, we comprise the elements ourselves. As she worked to bring the painted air, water and earth in her pictures into harmony within the confines of the canvas, she brooded on the idea of the yield point – the point of stress at which the structure cannot hold and deformation occurs, the catastrophic point of giving way.” – Dr Sarah Engeldow, 2023.