16/10/2026
Opening this evening at Bett Gallery Jane burton ‘s arresting new exhibition ‘Nightwood’ , spend time with these works like we did and they continue to reveal themselves long after you’ve looked away
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Opening tomorrow: Jane Burton
Nightwood
16 October - 7 November 2026
Opening Friday 16 October, 5:30 - 7pm
Jane burton
In her series ‘Nightwood’, Jane Burton draws on the title of Djuna Barnes’ 1936 novel, echoing also its atmospheric temperament. The book explores women who resist being read, or fixed in time and place. Characters are described as illegible and unpossessable. A woman’s presence stirs something ancestral and pre-human in whoever looks at her.
Burton’s prepossessing subject similarly appears unfixed. Photographed in a dimly lit interior, her skin emerges from, then dissolves back into, deep shadow, merging with the surrounding furniture and drapery. Across the series, her face is shown mostly veiled or turned away. The room setting seems both sumptuous and bleak, slightly imperfect, photographed at angles and hard to place historically. Furnishings are cut off at the image’s edge, alluding to rooms and unknown activities beyond.
..A derelict farmhouse of weathered wood sits in a valley pooling with mist. As distant hills encircle, the mist seems to rise up, drawn to the hushed dwelling. Is this the place where the woman (or women) of Nightwood might reside? Or does it too signal that spatial anomaly of the mind, a place of unlimited fantasy, of memories and imagination? In other images, the bones of dead gum trees appear in stark relief against bleached sky, yellowing grass and inert opaline water. These gnarled, reaching remains stand as monuments to their own once-verdant life-force.
– Excerpt from exhibition essay by Mimi Kelly
Image: Nightwood 3 2026
pigment print
75 x 75 cm (image size)
edition of 5 plus 1 artist’s proof
(BG11639)
