Fiona Barrett-Clarke lives and works on Dharug land in the suburban peripheries of Sydney, where the friction between the built environment and remnant bushland forms the conceptual terrain of her practice. Situated in close proximity to the CBD yet bordered by dense vegetation, this threshold condition, at once domestic and untamed, becomes a site through which she interrogates contemporary experiences of landscape.
Her paintings are attuned to the liminal temporality of dusk, a transitional register in which perception is destabilised and the familiar begins to slip. Saturated skies, often rendered in heightened, almost hallucinatory colour, press against the darkened silhouettes of suburban forms, invoking a tension between expansiveness and containment. Within this oscillation, Fiona mobilises a distinctly Antipodean inflection of the sublime, one that is not located in remote wilderness, but emerges within the everyday proximities of the suburban edge. Here, the grandeur of the sky is inseparable from an undercurrent of unease.
The work also engages the logic of the uncanny, as articulated in both psychoanalytic and art historical frameworks, wherein the ordinary is made strange through subtle shifts in light, scale and atmosphere. Streets, rooftops and treelines become charged sites, suspended between recognition and estrangement. In this way, Fiona’s practice can be situated within, and in quiet tension with, traditions of Australian landscape painting, from the nationalist pastoral to contemporary rereadings of place, by reconfiguring landscape not as a distant vista, but as an immediate, lived and psychologically complex environment.
Her work ultimately foregrounds the overlooked thresholds between nature and habitation, prompting a renewed attentiveness to the latent intensity of the environments that surround us.
Fiona graduated from The Sydney Gallery School in 1998, majoring in painting, and has since presented ten solo exhibitions. She has been represented by Saint Cloche since 2020.
