PJ Twomey

PJ Twomey is a Sydney-based painter whose work sits at the shifting boundary between realism and abstraction — where a wave is still a wave, but also something more unsettling, more felt than seen.

Working primarily in oils from her studio at the Headland Park Artists Precinct in Georges Heights, Mosman, Twomey has spent decades developing a visual language grounded in landscape and seascape. Coastal forms, atmospheric light, and the restless movement of water recur throughout her paintings — not as subjects to be faithfully reproduced, but as starting points for compositions that probe perception, ambiguity, and the gap between what we see and what we sense beneath the surface.

There is a quality of controlled instability in Twomey's work. Through carefully constructed tonal palettes and finely worked surfaces, she introduces subtle disruptions — moments where the familiar tips toward the uncanny, where solidity gives way to flux. The viewer is held in a productive uncertainty, invited to look again, to reconsider..

"My practice investigates the aesthetics of non‑attachment through the depiction of objects that have become physically and symbolically unmoored. By situating these objects within the oceanic environment, I examine how material forms behave once they are released from systems of ownership, function, and fixed meaning. Through this body of work, I propose that the oceanic environment offers a model for understanding impermanence not as erasure but as ongoing transformation. The paintings function as meditations on contingency, transition, and the quiet dissolution of certainty. In rendering objects in states of drift, I aim to foreground the generative potential of release and the inevitability of change within both material and psychological landscapes." ~ PJ Twomey.

This tension between realism and abstraction, between presence and illusion, places her work in ongoing conversation with both the traditions of observational painting and the wider concerns of contemporary visual culture.

Twomey's formation as an artist is both rigorous and unusually broad, combining deep technical training with theoretical grounding and a rich professional life beyond the studio. She trained at the Julian Ashton Art School — one of Australia's oldest and most respected institutions for drawing and painting, with a lineage stretching back to 1890 — before going on to study Art History and Theory at the University of Sydney. She later completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Sydney College of the Arts, cementing a practice built equally on looking, thinking, and making.

Early in her career, Twomey worked as Art Director at Beaver Press, where she directed the design and production of major publications including exhibition catalogues for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This role gave her an intimate understanding of how art is presented and how visual communication shapes the way work is received — an understanding that continues to inform the considered, precise way she approaches her own painting surfaces. She subsequently founded Art Effects, her own studio practice specialising in bespoke decorative finishes and trompe l'oeil commissions for private and commercial clients. Trompe l'oeil — the art of painting so convincingly that the eye is deceived — demands an exceptional command of illusion, surface, and the mechanics of perception. It is a demanding discipline, and one that refined the technical mastery and sensitivity to material that remains central to everything Twomey makes today.

For nearly two decades alongside her studio practice, Twomey has worked as an art educator in secondary and community settings across New South Wales. This long commitment to teaching reflects a genuine belief in art as a living, shared practice — not a private pursuit but something that belongs to a broader community of makers and viewers.

Twomey has maintained a consistent and growing presence in Sydney's art community since the early 2000s, with a particular and longstanding connection to the Headland Park precinct in Mosman, where she has exhibited at the Landship Gallery regularly since 2006. Over more than two decades her work has been shown across a wide range of Sydney venues — from the Marianne Newman Gallery in Artarmon and the Charles Hewitt Gallery to the TAP Gallery in Darlinghurst, the Arthouse Hotel, and the Francis Keevil Gallery in Woollahra — as well as in regional centres including Port Macquarie and on the Central Coast.

A significant moment came in 2023 when her work Diaspora 3 (oil on canvas, 101.6 × 101.6 cm) was selected as a finalist in the London Biennale Art Exhibition — an international contemporary art prize held in London that draws entries from artists across the globe. The following year, 2024, brought a further finalist selection in the SOHO Galleries Exhibition in Sydney, and continued participation in the prestigious Artists of Mosman 2088 exhibition at the Mosman Art Gallery, where she has shown in 2022 and again in 2025.

These recognitions reflect a practice that has steadily deepened and broadened — one that is now ready, and rightly so, for a wider audience.