Storage, 2026

The imagery in this work began as a dream, where my immediate landscape appeared less as a specific place and more as an atmosphere or symbol. I became interested in vernacular structures as vessels for memory, labour and customs, particularly dwellings and buildings that have been used and altered across generations. Their presence punctuates rural environments, even as many have become abandoned or obsolete.
I worked through several iterations of the painted surface, building and removing layers of muted earth tones. The final version became an experiment in restraint, allowing earlier marks and the history of its making to remain visible. The brushmarks give the structure a sense of energy and atmosphere while remaining suspended in stillness. I was thinking about memory as something that accumulates through fragments rather than existing as a fixed narrative.
The work also nods to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Water Towers photographs and their portrait-like presentation of these vernacular structures. While human beings are largely absent, evidence of their labour remains visible. I am interested in this tension between absence and the enduring presence of what has been built in negotiation with the landscape.

Lauren Fahey is a contemporary painter from Gundungurra Country, NSW living and working between Naarm/Melbourne and Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country/Canberra. Drawing on rural lived experience, Fahey’s practice explores memory, stewardship, and the evolving relationship between people and ecological landscapes. Working primarily in oils, her process-led paintings transform observation, recollection and dreams into contemplative scenes and symbolic forms that consider care, ritual, time and environmental change. Through techniques of surface abrasion, transparent layering and sensitive mark-making, her works reflect processes of erosion and regeneration, revealing the emotional, cultural and ecological histories embedded within land. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at RMIT University in 2021 and has since exhibited across Melbourne and Tasmania, with work held in private collections nationally and internationally.