Understorey

Understorey works in two registers: a vertical wash of ultramarine, cobalt and white falling from the top of the canvas, and a dense passage of looping, calligraphic marks gathered at the base. The two zones meet in a transitional band where light appears to enter matter - rain into thicket, weather into ground.

A single red mark sits low in the tangle, partly obscured by the descending wash. It functions as the painting’s gravitational point: a small, living signal within a field that is otherwise tonal and atmospheric.

The work was built in layers - an acrylic underpainting of looped gestural marks, overlaid with oil for the vertical passages and final adjustments. It belongs to an ongoing series drawing on the coastal bushland of Western Australia’s South West, where dense low growth and shifting coastal light are the dominant visual conditions.

The work is finished to a clean taped edge on a 1 cm stretched canvas, with unpainted sides - designed to hang unframed against the wall, or to be float-framed.

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Genevieve Hohnen is a contemporary Australian artist working across fine-line ink drawing and mixed-media painting.

Her practice explores repetition as a cognitive and physical process — how rhythm, breath and sustained attention can be recorded through simple lines and shapes. Working slowly with archival ink on heavyweight paper, she builds drawings through hundreds of deliberate marks. The image is not planned in advance; it emerges through duration. Small irregularities remain visible as evidence of presence. Structure gradually softens into drift, forming organic fields that suggest currents, textiles and growth patterns while remaining entirely abstract.

A current series of mixed-media paintings on canvas — predominantly oil, with drawing and other media worked into the surface — extends this enquiry into colour, depth, light, form and shape. Where the ink works hold attention through the slow accumulation of marks, the paintings open the same investigation into a fuller pictorial space: how light moves through layered passages of colour, how form emerges and recedes, how the discipline of repetition can be carried from line into volume. The two practices share the same conceptual ground — sustained looking, the registration of presence, order found inside duration — and meet in the studio as parallel ways of thinking.

Hohnen's work is informed by neurodiversity and the varied ways perception can organise itself. Branching attention, layered awareness and nonlinear focus are translated into visual rhythm — works that loop, expand, compress and reform. Rather than illustrating thought, they function as quiet spatial environments the viewer completes through looking.

The drawings remain minimal and monochrome; the paintings carry the same quiet attention into colour and pictorial depth. Together they act as calm architectural objects within a space, inviting slower viewing and allowing the eye and body to settle into their internal cadence.

Based in Perth, Western Australia, Hohnen is developing an ongoing body of perceptual studies in line and paint, investigating movement, regulation and the subtle order found inside repetition.