In The Last Days of Summer, Fiona Barrett-Clark captures the final warmth of the season with sensitivity and nostalgia. Her paintings evoke moments suspended between memory and presence, when the lingering heat gives way to the shifting light and mood of seasonal change.

Working from her home on Dharug land, just thirty minutes from Sydney’s CBD, Fiona Barrett-Clark draws inspiration from the unique meeting of suburban life and surrounding bushland. Previously focused on twilight scenes of rooftops and trees, this new body of work marks a shift to the coastal landscape. The beach offers a broader, elemental horizon, yet the same transient qualities of light and atmosphere remain central.

Through this transition, Fiona Barrett-Clark deepens her exploration of memory and place, capturing childhood nostalgia and the changing seasons against the vast sea and sky.

On any evening, as she moves through daily routines, Fiona Barrett-Clark often catches sight of the sky through her kitchen window. The sky is always changing, shifting from day to night, softening and darkening as the sun sets. She is drawn to this moment for its quiet beauty and the gentle release it brings as the day ends. The sky glows from within, brushing the cloud tips with light, hovering over dark suburban silhouettes like a framed painting - a spectacle we so rarely pause to notice.

“There are days at the beach that remind us of childhood and simpler times the buzzing of cicadas, salt on the breeze, sun on skin, wild hair.

The freedom of having nothing to do, if only for a few precious days.

Looking out across the ocean, sky stacked on sea two glowing orbs rise and fall, shifting the light, the mood as a rainbow of colour unfurls and fades.”