EMILY FERRETTI

Chance of Rain

Sophie Gannon Gallery

22 Apr 2025 – 10 May 2025

Emily Ferretti’s exhibition 'Chance of Rain' captures the shifting moods of the landscape—heat, light, and shadow, filtered through memory and feeling. Painted in the height of Melbourne’s summer, these works move away from her familiar blues and greens, instead embracing a palette of intense reds, neon oranges, and highlighter yellows. The fiery hues recall the ephemeral magic of a summer evening sky, sail-or’s delight.

These imagined landscapes are layered with emotion, metaphor, and traces of lived experience. Through raindrops, puddles, creeks, turtles, reeds and fish, Ferretti evokes a sense of presence and absence. Foreground and background col-lapse and expand, creating a spatial ambiguity that heightens the paintings' poetic sensibility. Ferretti plays with perspectives, using trees to slice through compositions, shaping space while holding moments of stillness.

Beneath these atmospheric explorations lies an urgency. The intensity of the palette suggests both the beauty and the volatility of climate, its unpredictability, its extremes. The hidden turtles stand in for family, for the unseen but deeply felt connections we carry. Vulnerability lingers in the quiet spaces between, in the suggestion of weather approaching, the moment before the storm.

Ferretti’s paintings hover between sensation and memory, where colour becomes a language of emotion. The vibrant, heat-soaked palette unsettles, flickering between warmth and alarm, tenderness and tension. In this liminal space, time slows, the paintings hold not just weather, but feeling, a quiet reckoning with the forces that shape us. There is a rhythm to her marks, a push and pull between movement and stillness, presence and absence. Like a distant storm rolling in, her works suggest a world on the cusp of change, where beauty and uncertainty intertwine.


Essay written by Kathryne Genevieve Honey