Cloud Nine

Marieke Dench

17 May

2025

2025

14 Jun

2025

Marieke Dench’s new body of paintings is a contemplation of happiness across diverse national geographies. Known for her ability to translate statistical data into striking visual artworks, Dench here transposes the facts and figures of happiness-by-continent into the form of billowing clouds. Traditionally associated with divine presence, change and interconnectedness, clouds are increasingly seen as symbols of the information age.

Dench plays with the ambiguity of the form as both an image of communality but also one where the hard realities revealed by information feeds are brought unflinchingly to light. “Choose your continent of birth wisely”, the artist admonishes. “Europe is the happiest; Africa is the unhappiest”. Vibrant colors are used to represent nations with higher happiness scores—blues, greens, and yellows, each with underlying data streams that contrast the natural and the digital.

The paintings enable viewers not only to understand global happiness data but to ‘feel’ it in the colours and diaphanous flows. Such an approach challenges viewers to reflect on what happiness means on both a personal and societal level, making the art not just a reflection of statistics, but also a tool for social dialogue. The works draw on key social markers including literacy, gender equality, family size and age dependency.

Dr Damian Smith

Installation View

No items found.

Artworks

Artworks

Artist Profile/s

Marieke Dench

Born
Lives
Skin
Language

Marieke Dench holds a Fine Arts Degree from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and a 1st Class Honours Degree in Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (R.M.I.T). Dench has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for over 20 years. The breadth of her practice includes painting, encaustic painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture and architectural installation. Dench has been the recipient of a Collie Trust Scholarship as well as winning a number of awards, including the Silk Cut Award and the Shell Fremantle Non-Acquisitive Print Award. Her work is held in numerous Australian public and private collections and has undertaken major commissions in both of these sectors.

View works