Carmel
McCarney

I create large-scale abstract oil paintings exploring how feeling, memory and time can co-exist within a single surface. Living by the ocean, I immerse myself daily in nature, returning to the studio to paint from memory rather than observation. Colour carries this experience inviting the viewer to the same emotional response as the blue of the ocean, or the amber warmth of a sunrise.

Working with diluted oil paint, I pour, tilt and lift layers, adding and removing with a balance of control and chance. As each layer settles, it leaves its own organic record of time as lived experience. The resulting shapes resemble tidelines, cell-like pools, or concentric growth rings. Atmospheric forms hover in translucent veils like shifting light and the circle recurs throughout as a symbol of seasons, natural cycles, and the cosmos.

I choose abstraction because it lets feeling move through colour and materiality to communicate something beyond the physical world, inviting maker and viewer alike to slow down and feel their way into the work.