Jane Burton: Nightwood

The Possessed: Jane Burton’s  Nightwood
Mimi Kelly

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. Barnes writes of a woman who is “beast turning human”, and Burton’s subject often seems caught in an unfinished state. She is beautiful, yet in her enigmatic mode appears on the cusp of turning from, or into, something – a restless cyclicality. In this way, she is neither fully present nor fully given over to the darkness. Instead, she appears captured here in a moment of poised stillness before slipping away through time, or metamorphosing. This dissolution of the body also carries a distinctly surrealist charge. Herein, flesh becomes threshold rather than object, signalling the interior realm, a site of uncanny fantasy owned by the artist, rather than documentary description.

In one image, 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.

Veils and layering run through the series as tactile membranes and metaphors for passage between states. In their most loaded form, white suggests bridal lace and black a mourning veil; covering the body, a shroud. In Nightwood, veils are not worn toward an altar, yet the gesture of ritual remains operative for other, mysterious transformational ends. The craquelure effect of some photographs, halos and lace vignettes that surface like impressions of gothic liquid light in others, and the mirroring water allude to worlds subtly revealed through worlds. Textured, crackle-patterned glass doors draw the eye further inward, toward psychological realms and energies.

Behind the glass, the shadows of flourishing monstera and philodendron leaves loom through the blur. Yet in certain photographs, wilted, dried leaves also adorn the green folding screen. In one image, the subject holds a dead leaf aloft, as if her vampiric touch has drained this once-living flora to fuel her own vitality. A chthonic Persephone, she carries the dying season with her, its withering the measure of her own fecundity. In another image, a red-lined suitcase, lid open behind her, reads as a vulva of genesis and lust.

As mist encroaches, patina covers, and lace obscures, the revealing and concealing in one suggests a crepuscular in-between space that holds sway over landscape and body. Interior and exterior also share the psychic, dreamlike terrain. Is this a memory or a yearning? References to aged paintings and early glass-plate erotic photography suggest a private mythology, enacted here to honour the tension between opulence and ominousness, desire and mourning, beauty and decay.

In inhabiting the inherited code of historic erotic portraiture from the inside, Nightwood is a site of pleasure taken on the artist’s own terms. The subject’s poses, velvet and lace, glimpsed bare flesh, and dark-wood furniture shape a meditative, knowing address to the viewer. Where her face is veiled or averted, she withholds herself from the gaze in favour of the inner world. Where she does look out, her regard is level and appraising. This is a type of hauntology, in which the erotic codes of the past return, but inhabited by a present-tense woman. The spectre of an imagined realm of ambiguous, desired and desiring flesh works through the figure who appears throughout the series. Yet she is less a fictitious subject recalled from the past than an avatar of the now: a figure through whom Burton stages her own longing, dread and unfinished histories. The naturescapes that intersperse the portraits extend this emotional reach. They are personal sites of meaning for the artist, bearing the scars of memory. The series’ uneasy, elusive glamour is Burton’s gift rather than something the viewer can simply take without the artist’s invocation. Where Barnes’ narrator describes a woman as a vessel for someone else’s ancestral hunger, Burton relocates the hunger’s wellspring entirely within a woman’s visual and sensorial register. The eroticism inherited from older photographic tradition is repossessed and felt. Here, it is something a woman does with her own desire. With the artist behind the camera and her avatar before it, Nightwood becomes an act of erotic self-possession, staged in the very codes that once elided women’s own authorship.

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.