Christopher Kerley

'The source of my images is the everyday. I’m always looking and noticing things, wherever I go. Small, mundane details tend to pique my interest and can take on a life of their own once they appear in a painting. Usually, there’s a visual trigger that hooks me, perhaps the composition of a group of trees, the outline of a building, or the way light falls across an object.

Sometimes an idea comes to mind and I’ll seek out forms to photograph that align with it, then make drawings to adjust the reference to suit my needs. As the painting develops, I usually discard the reference photo and begin working directly with the image, without anything in between. I hope the finished works hold an emotional or psychological charge, though this only seems to emerge after much toil and editing in the studio.

Everything begins with those basic visual components captured in the real world. In the studio, I keep shifting the image around until it “works”—adding and subtracting elements, often ending up with something far from the original concept.'
Artist Statement - Christopher Kerley

Lights to warn us of danger; lights to guide us home. There are motion-activated settings that guide us up the stairs to the front door, illuminated arrows that will save us if there is a fire. Yet there is light that does nothing more than tell us it’s a beautiful day outside when we are marooned in a dark lounge room, unable to leave, and that light is cruel. It is the light we can see and not feel. Light is stark and uncaring, and in the final analysis, small.

The darkness is much, much larger.

The paintings of Christopher Kerley are poems of light and dark.

Christopher makes a powerful point in his work: no amount of light poured onto a space can reveal what is gone; it can only reveal that something has gone, and that it will not be seen again.

An unseen light illuminates a red and white chair, empty on a concrete veranda. The vertical slats and tidiness of the garden suggest the dwelling is inhabited. The veranda light extends a small bright oasis, but the dark it sits in is far larger, stretching out to drain into the sky. We do not know, can not know, if the chair is still used, but we are certain it once was: its placing seems so definite. So exact.

Christopher’s art takes us into small, secret spaces.

He takes us to quiet back verandas, to shut window blinds and to blank corridors bathed the marine-blue glow of exit lights. Christopher shows us spaces that are at the edge of habitation and emptiness, where the stillness is pregnant with suggestion. They are spaces where people are, just not now, or have been for decades. The mid-century brickwork and window fittings suggest an established community, yet there is no one home.

The lights are on though; Christopher presents us with a catalogue of small incidents and observations:

A small, bright limpet of a light fitting bathes an entrance to a red-brick dwelling in warm amber.

From what seems to be the intransience of a hotel room, a glimpse of a sunset is just discernible over a neighbouring building. It is there, yet unattainable.

More amber-orange light, again suggestive of comfort, leaks out of a window to cast a fuzzy oblong on an opposing wall. Between the presumably inhabited homes, a cobbled lane heads underneath a street lamp, where a cone of white-blue fluorescence serves to accentuate the cold and make the darkness beyond the contour of hard white somehow darker still. This image, in particular, has a potent weight: there’s inaccessible succour at either side of the only direction to take, along a path that leads in a tenebrous black that seems solid and impassible.

All these works are linked by strange sensations of loss, of absence, of missed opportunity. The impression a human made upon a small location, appears again and again in Christopher’s art. There was a story here, a presence that made this place the images are almost haunted, and perhaps this is what ghosts truly are: a memory, triggered by an object, by a light, or by encountering an old building that is almost the same as a dwelling recalled, but not quite.

Not quite.

Memory is not as we really understand it; it fades and grows inaccurate over time. We know what loss is, but why does someone who is not there dominate a space so much?

Christopher’s work uses architecture, light and the triggers of our memories to understand what these things are, and are not. His skill in painting the contours of light, and to differentiate between kinds of light, gives him the ability to encode his work with analogy that works with his imagery, not overwhelming it; this is not didactic work. Rather, it offers a kind of understanding of what it is to be a human and travel through life, to feel connection and to experience loss, and that while the moments of glowing wonder are few, they are still there; the light is still on and we may enter the house safely, for now.

Catalogue Essay by Andrew Harper 2025