As a kid, I was always drawing — constantly, obsessively, urgently trying to capture the world exactly as I saw it. At first, this meant chasing hyperrealism, trying to nail every line, shadow, texture and curve with my sharp little 2B pencil. It was like if I could just get it right, somehow I’d understand the world a little better.

But over time, that surface-level obsession made a significant shift. I started looking beyond what things looked like, and started asking what they meant. That gaze turned both inward and outward in my life and and in my art — telescoping into the vastness of the universe, and tunnelling down into the messy depths of my own psyche.

I wanted to understand more about what the hell was going on with this beautiful, crazy and often bewildering world.

So, naturally (for me) I turned to books. I devoured anything that might offer insight into the human condition — why we suffer, how we survive, and how we can possibly stitch some joy, some meaning, some absurd laughter into all of it. I was looking for maps — emotional, spiritual, existential. Maps that could help me understand what lies beneath people’s surfaces, and maybe, just maybe, help me make peace with my own.

At the same time, I found myself mesmerised by the universe itself — not just as backdrop, but as a living, breathing puzzle. I dove headfirst into popular science books, captivated by writers like Philip Ball, Paul Davies, and James Gleick. Their work opened up the staggering beauty of the natural world, the elegant chaos of it all. I was equally pulled into sci-fi and cyberpunk, where science and imagination collided in thrilling, unsettling, visionary futures.

And somewhere in the collision of all these ideas — human and cosmic, emotional and scientific — I fell in love with patterns. Not just visual ones, but the underlying rhythms and repetitions that connect everything.

As an artist, this created both a hunger and a tension. I had all this insight bubbling inside me, but I struggled with how to express it visually — how to make work that wasn’t just an illustration or a diagram, but something that captured the emotional weight and wonder of what I was discovering.

That’s when I began to move from figurative work toward abstraction — to create a visual language that could hold both the deeply personal and the vastly universal.

My art works may seem highly resolved, but I’m always trying to find ways to let the cracks and chaos in, to avoid the rigidity and illusions of certainty, of stagnation, fossilising - to embrace the essential transience of life. This acceptance is an ongoing work in progress. 

My painted and threaded surfaces are precise and highly controlled, and eventually the colours and forms end up in conversation together, but there are always (many) moments of not knowing that happen along the way.

The making process is a struggle and a journey  to reconcile the works and to bring these opposite elements together - making room for idiosyncrasy and complexity - bringing chaos and structure into harmony.  

Claire Mooney is a visual artist and art teacher who lives and works in Melbourne/Naarm. She lives with her husband and dog near the Darebin Creek in Reservoir.

She is represented by Tacit Art, Melbourne.