The Cloud and the Lines, 2025

On my phone, I have gathered 762 photographs of roads and power lines. They stretch back to 2012, an unconscious archive of repetition and return. Roads and lines appear everywhere – in cities, in fields, in coastal towns. They comfort me with their order, their rhythm, their quiet insistence on connection. They guide, they divide, they carry us forward and lead us back. This painting rises from one of those ordinary yet extraordinary moments. It was late summer, early evening, and I was walking home from the beach along Ocean Road in Point Lonsdale, where I live. With the setting of the sun, suddenly, the sky erupted: a single cloud ignited with colour so radiant, so consuming, that it seemed to draw the light out of the land itself and release it skyward in an explosion of brilliance. Below, the road was subdued, its surface muted. The power lines etched their steady geometry against the sky, anchoring the fleeting spectacle to the everyday world. Their presence tethered me – reminding me that the miraculous is always glimpsed through the familiar, that transcendence is framed by what we know and walk beside every day. The Cloud and The Lines is a meditation on this paradox: how the predictable and the prosaic can hold open the door to the sublime. It is about guidance and connection, but also about awe. A reminder that sometimes the most magnificent revelations arrive not on distant horizons, but along the very road we take home.

Jennifer D’Arcy is an Australian artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, producing diverse themes of work that are united by strong detail and bold expressive colour. A graduate of Melbourne University’s Victorian College of the Arts (Bachelor of Fine Arts, First Class Hons), she recently completed a summer residency at the New York Academy of Art where she was awarded a scholarship for exceptional merit. She is currently the artist in residence at Melbourne Grammar School. D’Arcy has been a finalist in numerous national art prizes, including the National Emerging Art Prize, The Lester Prize and the Darling Portrait Prize and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with pieces held in public and private collections worldwide.