Hayley Megan French paints landscapes that express, via abstraction and minimalism, a connection to place. “The paintings,” she explains, “are about the perspectives we carry about landscapes, not a specific place.” The group of square and rectangular canvases in Against the sky are painted over the top of French’s old canvases.

Consisting of a wash of chalky white broken by vertical black lines, the remnants of the shapes of her old work are texturally visible beneath the painting.

It’s a personal, psychological painting – old perspectives are washed over but partially inform the new layers. French’s work continues to develop towards a reduction of form. Gone are the orange and white peaks reminiscent of the domed summits found in the Purnulu National Park, and other floating or emergent forms overlayed on black, of two years ago.

In 2015, French undertook PhD research into the ways in which Aboriginal art informs and influences Australian landscape painting. How did that research feed back into her practice? French says that it enabled her to acknowledge her own context and worldviews: “I could see where they came from and the way they inform how I see and think about landscape and also much wider social constructs in Australia.”