OBSERVER: Nell takes over Heide Museum
Heide Museum of Modern Art has announced a major exhibition by celebrated Australian artist Nell, taking over the award-winning Heide Modern building, from October 11 to March 8.
Titled Face Everything, the site-responsive exhibition will see Nell transform the former home into a vibrant, layered environment populated with more than 85 works from across her 30-year career, including over 50 new works.
Drawing on the domestic history of Heide Modern and its surrounding gardens, Nell reimagines the house as both a home and a nest – a place of shelter, memory and shared experience. Incorporating found household objects alongside natural motifs from the Heide environs, such as birds, snakes, apples, leaves and eggs, she animates the house with tapestries, mosaics, sculptures and intimate works that reference John and Sunday Reed’s desire for the house to be a ‘gallery to be lived in’ – where art, nature and daily life were entwined.
Within this setting, Nell’s works become charged with reflections on life cycles, care, tenderness, gendered labour, animism, pop culture, rock and roll, religion and art history.
Combining everyday materials with meticulous hand-crafted and fabricated forms, she explores the tension between what is slow and precious, and what is fleeting and ordinary.
Nell also explores the opposition and integration of interior and exterior spaces, reflecting architect David McGlashan’s intention for the building to blur the boundaries between house and landscape.
Her works speak to both the physical connection between Heide Modern and its natural environment, and to our psychological inner worlds, evoking the constant negotiation between inside and outside, self and surroundings.
Nell said: “For this exhibition my extended family of characters and spirits will inhabit Heide Modern. Together, they hold space for celebration and joy, complexity and grief, and everything in between.
“Throughout my practice I’ve used simple faces—from open-mouthed ‘oohs’ in eggs and ghosts to smiley faces in just about everything—as a way to bypass intellect and invite an immediate, emotional response. Like a song that cuts to the heart, for me the simplest artworks go the deepest.
“Ghosts have been a constant presence in my work. They grew out of self-reflection and therapy, and from a desire to acknowledge the shadows in my life rather than push them away. I’m drawn to the places where light and dark overlap, where contradictions can sit side by side”.
Heide Museum of Modern Art Director Lesley Harding said: “We are delighted to have Nell take over Heide Modern with a site-responsive exhibition that captures the spirit of the place.”
Contibuted