Jane Burton: Nightwood

EXHIBITION COMING ONLINE SOON

OPENING NIGHT: FRIDAY 16 OCTOBER, 2026, 5.30pm

'Nightwood' sees Jane Burton draw 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...

Jane Burton is a nationally recognised Australian artist working in the medium of photography. Her work explores mortality, desire, and isolation and is often darkly ambiguous, enigmatic and provocative.

Since graduating in 1991 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours), from the School for the Arts, UTAS, she has exhibited her work regularly, holding forty solo exhibitions, including a twenty year survey ‘Eye of the Beholder’ (2009), at the Glen Eira City Art Gallery, Melbourne. She has twice staged solo projects at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (1999, 2005), and her work has been included in numerous curated exhibitions and significant museum shows, among them: ‘Hold Still: the photographic performance’ (2018), and ‘Body Parts’ (2015), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; ‘Fantastic Dreamland – Contemporary Australian Photography’, Shanghai Exhibition Centre, China (2012); ‘Trace Elements: spirit and memory in Japanese and Australian photomedia’, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2008), and Performance Space, Sydney (2009); ‘Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography’, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2006); ‘Anxious Bodies’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and ‘Moral Hallucination: Channelling Hitchcock’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2000).

Burton’s work is held in the collections of prominent state funded galleries, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. Two monographs of her photographs have been published by M.33, Melbourne: ‘It is Midnight, Dr. _ _’, in 2017, and ‘Other Stories’, in 2011.