Nell’s Face Everything – quick links
This month Nell will be presenting a major survey exhibition at the Heide Museum of Modern art, which will be transformed by the artist’s humorous, joyful and comical works.
Over 85 pieces – including 50 new works – are included in Face Everything, which opens 11 October. Drawing on the domestic history of Heide and its surrounding gardens, Nell will embed her characters and beloved ghostly icons into the environment, considering the site as a place of shelter, memory and shared experience.
Motifs include birds, snakes, apples, leaves and eggs, which are employed across tapestries, mosaics, sculptures and intimate works referencing the desire of Heide founders John and Sunday Reed that the house be a ‘gallery to be lived in’.
Nell says, ‘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.’
Nell: the power of simplicity
Often adopting the familiar in order to evoke intuitive responses, Nell’s works are accessible to a range of audiences.
‘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,’ says the artist.
‘Like a song that cuts to the heart, for me the simplest artworks go the deepest,’ she continues. ‘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: house and landscape
Face Everything invites Heide’s history and architecture into play, exploring the blurring between house and landscape, as well as tension of what is slow and previous, and what is fleeting and ordinary.
Heide Museum of Modern Art Director Lesley Harding says, ‘We are delighted to have Nell take over Heide Modern with a site-responsive exhibition that captures the spirit of the place. Face Everything brings another dimension to this domestic space, drawing out its histories and reimagining it as a living, breathing environment. Nell’s ability to move between joy and grief, the everyday and the symbolic, makes this exhibition both engaging and deeply resonant.’
Face Everything is at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne from 11 October 2025 to 8 March 2026. Look out for ArtsHub’s interview with Nell inside the exhibition, coming soon.
Also on ArtsHub: With an $80k commission, Heather B Swann embarks on the final series of her lifetime
Celebrated for her surreal and mesmerising imagery, Heather B Swann, at 64, will present The Forests of Symbols, an $80,000 Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission, at UNSW Galleries in Sydney next year.
The new project brings together the artist’s works in sculpture, painting and drawing, and is conceived as the first in a final series to be completed during her lifetime.
Heather B Swann’s forests of symbols
The poetic exhibition title is a metaphor for how Swann experiences the world, as well as a reminder of the collective symbols that shape cultural memory.
She explains, ‘The Forests of Symbols is an umbrella for what I have made and what I will make. My work is situated deep inside my nervous system, and I see the world “feelingly”.
‘Floating around in a metaphorical forest of symbols searching for the pathos in things, I am a leaf in the wind, a daydreamer. There are too many meanings to make sense in here; the day breaks and the night falls, someone is shooting the breeze, and I hear a faint line singing that this whole wide world is longing for beauty.’
