The healing power of the Coolum cloud atlas
Artist Kellie O’Dempsey muses on mortality in her exquisite watercolour show A Cloud Never Dies.
After her father died, artist Kellie O’Dempsey found solace in the view from his front verandah at Coolum. That vista of the changing sky and clouds was comforting, so when her father passed away she got to work recording that view.
The result is the exhibition A Cloud Never Dies, now showing at Jan Manton Gallery at Teneriffe. It’s a beautiful show, one in which the artist’s grief is transmuted by the alchemy of art into a suite of gorgeous watercolours that record the evanescence of the clouds and skies she paints.
And as I browse, I find cloud songs surfacing from my subconscious. First comes the Joni Mitchell number Both Sides Now (first made famous by Judy Collins), in which she muses about clouds until she finally realises … “I really don’t know clouds at all”.
Then bizarrely up pops another tune, Maria, from The Sound of Music, of all things. It muses that Julie Andrews’ character in the film is so hard to define that the song asks: “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down”. Exactly. How do you? Well, for a start, you have to work fast, as O’Dempsey explains.
“There is the immediacy of trying to translate and capture the colours ,” she says. “These are all painted en plein air from my Dad’s deck. I had been thinking about doing this for a very long time and when he passed I thought – I must do it now. Recording that change at the end of the day, trying to capture it, it’s quite ethereal. But you have to be quick.”
A projection that is part of the exhibition shows that changing sky. The artist is known for her site-generated installations and performances that integrate projection, video, collage, architectural space, gestural line, performance and digital drawing. What did you say?, 2021, her 10-day installation work for exhibition Botanica: Contemporary Art Outside, presented in the City Botanic Gardens in Brisbane, was a collaboration between O’Dempsey and her partner, sound artist and musician Mick Dick. They actively engaged with the site of the work as a living space, asking the audience to breathe with the trees.
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O’Dempsey, who divides her time between Coolum and New Farm, admits that reverting to painting traditional scenery is a tad old school.
“As a contemporary artist I thought, I’m going to be laughed out of the gallery because the subject is so traditional,” she says.
She explains in an essay accompanying the exhibition that JMW Turner was an early influence and one that has remained with her until this year. And in a nice synergy, 2025 just happens to be the 250th birthday of the artist who inspired the coining of the phrase Turneresque. This denotes the use of light and colour to create powerful and dreamy atmospheres, notably skies and clouds. Yes, there is a little of the Turneresque about O’Dempsey’s exhibition.
“Situated within (the loaded tradition of Western) landscape painting in making these plein air works I returned to review the atmospheric studies of JMW Turner, while simultaneously revisiting the immersive colour fields of Mark Rothko’s works on paper,” she writes in her brief but informative essay.
“The horizon line emerges as a recurring motif – a stabilising force within a constantly shifting environment. It functions both as a boundary and as a passage, connecting the visible and the unseen, the present and the absent.”
Video projection and collaged elements “further blur the distinction between reality and illusion, extending the watercolour studies into immersive, ephemeral spaces beyond borders”.
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“The interplay between light, colour and movement echoes the fleeting nature of memory, reinforcing the transient presence of mortality.”
Reflecting on mortality after her father’s death is her inspiration here.
The title of the exhibition 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.
O’Dempsey says that this allegory resonates deeply with her “offering a framework for understanding loss as a process of perpetual change rather than disappearance”.
It’s a lovely idea and one that is easily understood taking in the fragile beauty of her watercolours. They are like visual poems or little hymns to both beauty and impermanence.
“While attempting to harness the instability of watercolour these transient moments became active meditations on impermanence and continuity,” she says. “Continually concerned with the gestural and experimental, my practice often seeks to capture the ephemeral – the temporality of experience.”
She has done just that.
A Cloud Never Dies continues at Jan Manton Gallery, Teneriffe, until February 7.
janmantonart.com