the veil

Buxton Contemporary 

Curated by Hannah Presley
Assistant Curator Isabella Hone-Saunders

Artists: Hayley Millar Baker, Hannah Gartside, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Glenda Nicholls, Lisa Waup and Lena Yarinkura.

The artists in the veil examine the elusive or intangible qualities that guide and shape our everyday lives. Through immersive installations of experimental printmaking, hand-woven objects, photography and film, each work serves as a portal. Demonstrating a deeply respectful engagement with every aspect of their artmaking, the artists offer moments of escape, introspection, and psychic grounding.    

Encompassing stories of identity, place, and embodied sensation, the veil presents an expanded, inclusive view of our world. It offers a counterpoint to the, at times, isolating effects of contemporary life, inviting connection with each other, with Country and with the otherworldly forces that bind us across time and space.

Central to the exhibition is a major new film commissioned for the veil, from Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Nira-Bulok Taungurung artist Hayley Millar Baker, titled Eternity the Butterfly, 2025. Millar Baker’s first film Nyctinasty, 2021 and her second, The Umbra, 2023 will also be on display – marking the first time all three films were be presented together. ‘Eternity the Butterfly reflects the transcendence narratives of Aboriginal peoples, grounded in their deep spiritual connections to ancestors and the colonial horrors they continue to endure.’ - Hayley Millar Baker

Hannah Gartside presented new and existing sculptural works, spanning a period of ten years. Trained in fashion and costume design, Gartside began sewing with her grandmother at age seven. Her past work as a classical ballet costumier informs her meticulous, labour-intensive techniques, which she now channels into a practice driven by intuition and sensitivity. With her distinct language of cloth, she creates sculptural work, installations and quilts using found fabrics, worn clothing and the material detritus of the past.

In an Australian premiere, Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska presented a specially curated selection of fourteen works from her photographic series Mama, 2018, exhibited in Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Mama is a haunting photographic series that unfolds like film stills, capturing intimate exchanges between the artist’s own daughter, Franciszka, and a hyperreal silicone bust modelled after herself. The daughter grooms and bathes her mother-doll in melancholy scenes that are interspersed with gentle moments of play and rest.

Lena Yarinkura is a senior Kune artist living and working between Maningrida and outstation Ankabadbirri in Arnhem Land; for the veil, Yarinkura has created a new series of Gnarr (spiders) and two large-scale fibre works that tell the story of Ngalmudj and the Two Sisters. Yarinkura’s Karrh (Spider) draws on a lifetime of fibre innovation, cosmological knowledge, and embodied storytelling. In Kune belief systems, the spider is a Yirridjdja moiety ancestor, a harbinger of sickness, and a sacred presence encoded across land, memory, ceremony and form. Yarinkura, recounts a profound personal encounter with karrh, being spun into a web and falling ill. This encounter linking bodily illness, ancestral visitation, and an experience that revealed the spider’s role as mediator between physical and spiritual realms.

Celebrated mixed-cultural First Nations artist and curator Lisa Waup will reimagine her ambitious installation holding Country, 2024. holding Country honours our natural environment, acknowledging both the spiritual existence of the land and the transformative power of water. Created in response to a major flood experienced with her family, the work contemplates the long and arduous processes of recovery and regeneration following such an extreme weather event. Country and connection to the natural environment are grounding forces in Waup’s work, encouraging narratives of engagement and activism. While trained as a printmaker, Waup embraces an experimental approach. Her confident mark-making and intricate patterning are emblematic to her multidisciplinary approach that encompasses printmaking, weaving, sculpture, jewellery and textiles.

The Reflection Net, 2024 by Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta artist and master weaver Glenda Nicholls, is an intricate example of her skill, The Reflection Net, is the physical embodiment of the dreamlike effect created when the sky is reflected in the flowing waters of the river below. Weaving is Nicholls’ way of connecting to her Country and through her elaborate artworks and installations she gives voice to the ongoing struggles of our sacred waterways.

Documentation by Christian Capurro.

Art Museums Paper 02 ‘the veil’ is available online or in person at Buxton Contemporary. Edited by Phillipa Milne and published with Paul Mylecharane from Public Office.