the veil

The University of Melbourne launched the veil, at Buxton Contemporary on Friday 27 June, and running through to 1 November 2025. The compelling exhibition explores the elusive and intangible qualities of memory, identity and place, while delving into the spiritual and otherworldly.

Curated by Hannah Presley, with Assistant Curator Isabella Hone-Saunders, featuring artists Hayley Millar Baker, Hannah Gartside, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Glenda Nicholls, Lisa Waup and Lena Yarinkura, ‘the veil’ features new commissions and recent acquisitions to the University Art Collection, bringing together works that illuminate the hidden forces that shape our lives. Through immersive installations—ranging from experimental printmaking and hand-woven objects to photography and film—each artist offers a portal into deeper connections with each other, with Country, and with the unseen energies that thread through time and space.

Hannah Presley said: “There have always been places described as transitional or strange—spaces that hum with energy, where the air feels thin and the light is dappled. These uncanny or supernatural qualities echo throughout the exhibition, revealing an intimate familiarity with the spirit world that, for many artists, deeply informs their daily lives. ‘the veil’ opens up an expanded, inclusive worldview, navigating in-between spaces beyond the reach of ordinary perception, through the expression of culture, memory, and emotion."

Central to the exhibition is a major new film by artist Hayley Millar Baker, titled Eternity the Butterfly commissioned by the University of Melbourne with support from Creative Australia and Creative Victoria. This work will be premiered and seen together with Millar Baker’s two previous films - Nyctinasty commissioned for the National Gallery of Australia in 2022 and The Umbra commissioned for Rising Festival 2023.  Millar Baker belongs to the Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Nira-Bulok Taungurung peoples through her maternal lineage, and has Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brasileiro ancestry on her paternal side. It is this confluence of cultural backgrounds that informs her practice, anchored by a reclamation of the power and agency found in Indigenous spiritual inheritance and ancestral connection. Drawing influence from cinematic traditions, including elements of horror, Millar Baker’s moving-image practice embraces a psychological intensity, rooted in a cyclical understanding of life and death, performed through ritual and transformation. Eternity the Butterfly reflects on the transcendent narratives of Aboriginal peoples, grounded in their deep spiritual connections to ancestors and the colonial horrors they continue to endure.

The striking work of Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska is showcased for the first time in Australia, with fourteen works from her photographic series Mama, exhibited at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Over the past two decades, Grzeszykowska has utilised the body, often her own, to interrogate identity, sexuality and the construction of self. Simultaneously tender and dark, Mama captures intimate exchanges between the artist’s daughter, and a hyperreal silicone bust modelled after herself. Revealing an unsettling narrative the works challenge and subvert maternal roles and notions of care, drawing us into a psychologically charged consideration of grief, absence, and embodiment.

A new University of Melbourne Art Museums acquisition by Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta artist and master weaver Glenda Nicholls, titled The Reflection Net, is presented at Buxton Contemporary for the first time. Suspended high in the gallery, the large-scale woven work evokes the sky reflected in Milloo (the Murray River)  with hand-crafted feather flowers floating like birds overhead. The work celebrates the cultural legacy of women and fishing, whilst also embodying the interconnectedness of all living things and the all-encompassing nature of Country. Nicholl’s practice makes a direct link to her Elders and ancestors, using her inherited net making technique. Since making her first net in 2011, she has gone on to revive the traditional practice, sharing it with the next generation, and ensuring the continuity of her family storyline.

Naarm/Melbourne based artist Hannah Gartside presents new and existing sculptural works, spanning a period of ten years. Working with found fabrics, her emotionally resonant and poetic works give form to feeling. Gartside draws on her background as a costumier to inform her meticulous processes of cutting and sewing.  Seeking the inherent memory held within her materials, Gartside reveals sensations of longing, tenderness, desire and fury. Among her works for the veil is a kinetic sculpture, Sarah, honouring French actress Sarah Bernhardt, originally commissioned by Hannah Presley for Primavera in 2021. Constructed from a steel armature wrapped in vintage silks, satins, and taffetas, the work conjures a sense of performance and presence as it spins.  Gartside’s new work, Returning, continues her short story, Frances, the moth, a tale of metamorphosis and personal transformation, with ornate beading that echoes the eyes on a moth’s wing.

Celebrated mixed-cultural First Nations artist Lisa Waup reimagines her ambitious installation holding Country, also a recent acquisition to the University of Melbourne Art Collection comprising 365 individually screen-printed sandbags, created in response to her experience of a major flood event. holding Country contemplates the long processes of recovery and regeneration following an extreme weather event and highlights the ongoing environmental degradation resulting from the colonisation of waterways. Waup reimagines the sandbag as a repository of memory, tradition, and shared experience. The work invites us to consider each of our individual responsibilities to care for and protect Country. Encompassing a diverse range of media, including weaving, printmaking, photography, sculpture, fashion, and digital art, Waup’s practice explores themes of family and motherhood, interwoven with broader historical narratives that shape her lived experience.

Lena Yarinkura is a senior Kune artist whose innovative sculptural practice has played a foundational role in the evolution of contemporary fibre art in Arnhem Land. She is widely recognised for her ambitious pandanus and paperbark sculptures which reimagine ancestral narratives of animals and spirit beings through ambitious, playful and sophisticated textural forms. Living and working between Maningrida and Ankabadbirri outstation, Yarinkura continues to produce impressive fibre-based work, creating a new artistic path that has inspired the next generation of artists. For the veil, Yarinkura has created a new series of four Karrh (Spider) and two large-scale works that tell the story of Ngalmudj and Two Sisters and their consequential interaction with Ngalmudj the Rainbow Serpent. Woven from Cocky Apple, Pandanus, Bush Cane ochres and ngarradj (white Cockatoo feathers), her web becomes a conduit between worlds—ancestral knowledge made new.

Charlotte Day, Director, Art Museums, University of Melbourne, said: “Buxton Contemporary is thrilled to present the immersive exhibition, ‘the veil’, that brings together a powerful and inspiring group of artists spanning different cultural backgrounds and generations. Featuring a major new commission from Hayley Millar Baker as well as recent University art collection acquisitions, the exhibition sees a rich array of works—from photography and film to fibre art, printmaking and sculpture—offering unique perspectives and deep engagements with the otherworldly.”