Horizonites takes its title from Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, in which a group of artists
become absorbed by the “tint of the horizon”: the blue-green haze where land and sky
meet, and where the actual plains begin to give way to an imagined one. In Murnane’s
account, this distant zone is not an escape from the landscape, but part of it, a threshold
through which another way of seeing the plains becomes possible.

Halloran-Mackay’s paintings are similarly attentive to what lies within landscapes that
can appear empty, unfinished or waiting to be made useful. Construction sites, half-built
houses, fences, overhead telephone lines and broad skies populate the exhibition, often
occupying the expanding suburban edges of Victoria’s volcanic plains. These structures
suggest development in progress, yet they also make visible the life that persists
around, beneath and within them.

Frogs disappear into weeds along a residential fence. Rabbits move through unfinished
structures. Spotted doves settle into a house, while a Nankeen night heron picks its way
through a wet paddock crossed by power lines. Elsewhere, leaves enter a seemingly
sealed architectural space, or fragments of birds, pattern and surrounding houses
multiply across reflective surfaces. Architecture becomes less a barrier between human
and natural worlds than a surface through which the surrounding landscape continually
reappears.

There is something close here to Murnane’s second group of artists, who look to the
weathered grasses of the plains for evidence of histories and worlds that ordinary vision
might overlook. In Horizonites, the apparent vacancy of these landscapes gives way to
abundance. What first appears banal, marginal or undeveloped becomes dense with
animal life, memory and atmosphere. The horizon, in this sense, is not simply a distant
line. It marks the point at which one landscape might begin to disclose another.