odelle morshuis - REGional Award winner

This painting came out of thinking about movement, how we are always passing through spaces, and through each other’s lives. The figures overlap and shift across the canvas, moving horizontally like a crowd in transit.

Most of them are just outlines, slipping in and out of visibility, while a few are more solid, painted in three dimensions. That difference feels important to me, some people stay with us, vivid and present, while others drift past, leaving only the trace of a line. The foreground is light, almost fragile, while above sits a deep ochre that seems to anchor the whole piece. For me, that colour holds time something steady against the fleeting movement of the crowd. I’m interested in that tension between permanence and change, between being here and then gone.

When I paint crowds like this, I’m thinking about the psychological spaces we inhabit. Every day we pass people in the street, in shops, in landscapes. Sometimes we connect, sometimes we don’t, but we’re always shaping and being shaped by those encounters. This painting tries to capture that- the constant flow of time and people, the way we carry spaces within us, and leave ourselves behind in return.