05 Highway Hypnosis by Marisa Purcell
21.03.2026 to 09.05.2026 by appointment 

Highway Hypnosis, a collection by Marisa Purcell that uses colour as a vessel for memory. Drawing from a residency in Bermagui on the NSW South Coast, the works translate feeling and atmosphere into abstraction.

Marisa Purcell makes paintings that ask to be looked at slowly. Working in monochrome with a reduced visual vocabulary, she builds surfaces of quiet complexity — where tone, texture, and light become the subject.

Purcell’s practice is grounded in the subtle relationships between tone, texture, and space. Her compositions resist immediate resolution — hovering between abstraction and suggestion, forms emerge from the surface only to dissolve again, leaving traces that feel both deliberate and ephemeral. This ambiguity is not incidental; it is the work’s central invitation.

Surface is fundamental to Purcell’s process. Layers of paint are built up and reworked over time, producing a tactile field where each mark records a moment of decision. The result is not a smooth or neutral plane, but a living surface that holds the memory of its own making — responsive to light, revealing shifts in density and depth as the viewer moves across it.

Though her works may initially appear minimal, they are far from austere. The reduction of colour and form heightens awareness of the smallest variations: a softened edge, a fading line, a barely perceptible shift in tone. Through this restraint, the paintings cultivate an atmosphere of stillness — one that rewards close, sustained attention.

Purcell’s paintings ultimately function as quiet environments for looking. They sit somewhere between painting and perception — neither presenting a definitive image nor withholding one entirely. In doing so, they remind us that depth and complexity can emerge not from excess, but from careful attention to the smallest details.