The misty intimacy of Kirrily Hammond’s ‘Nordic noir’ landscapes
Since graduating from the Canberra School of Art about 30 years ago, Kirrily Hammond has been almost a permanent fixture in the Canberra Art scene. This is her debut exhibition with the Grainger Gallery.
Hammond was born in Newcastle, received her art training in Canberra and Glasgow and, after living in Melbourne for 16 years, she settled in Copenhagen in Denmark late in 2018. The sense of place is crucial for her art, but she has never been drawn to the scenic or picturesque. There is a dark, brooding romantic sensibility that runs throughout her art, characterised by a veiled, misty light that contrasts with dark shadows.
When Hammond lived in Brunswick, Melbourne, for many years, her paintings depicted suburbia and the suburban skyline, where sinister intrigue seemed to lurk in the shadows.
With her move to the northern hemisphere and to a climate where winters are longer and daylight hours are shorter, she was again drawn to scenes like Kitchen Window, Dusk, Bønsvig Strand, and the Danish skyline.
It was the Italian surrealist artist, Giorgio de Chirico, who once observed, “There is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religions of the world”. Hammond, in her art, is drawn to this quality of the uncanny and the surreal, where nothing explicitly may be seen as happening, but in the pauses, silences and shadows, many mysteries seem to be concealed.
Her art is one of understatement, where, on a small scale, she creates deeply brooding tonal paintings, along with a few prints, in which she welcomes the darkness and a mysterious otherness.
Pot plants silhouetted against the light on a windowsill, dusk descending on a landscape setting, fading evening light over a suburban roofline with pine trees, or trees seen in the light of a sunset through a window frame.
These are some of her subjects. There is a certain casualness, informality, and everyday attitude expressed in her selection of imagery. Once selected, it is subsequently lovingly observed and recorded.
My favourite painting in the show is Sea ice, 2022, a small, almost aerial view of floating ice on water that some will identify with the bleak landscapes of Nordic noir.
There is no focal point or centre of the composition, but a sense of floating vastness that has no beginning or end.
The high horizon, sparseness, monotony of form and almost monochrome palette may bring to mind images of the Australian bush when viewed from above, but now it is a study of a frozen wasteland.
Over the course of three decades, Hammond has developed a distinctive voice in her art. In terms of her Australian forerunners, one is reminded of the misty moderns, including Clarice Beckett and others trained by the tonalist painter Max Meldrum and his disciples; however, she has made this tonal pictorial language peculiarly her own.
Hammond’s paintings are a triumph of slow art, where you are gradually seduced into an intriguing and moody world where nothing much happens, but the potential is immense. It is up to the viewer to discover the drama that lies beyond the observed reality.
Kirrily Hammond: Debut exhibition, Grainger Gallery, Building 3.3/1 Dairy Rd, Fyshwick, closes 9 November. It’s open from Wednesday to Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm.
Review published in Region, 4 November 2025