Exhibition: Nightwood – Jane Burton

‘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.’ Bett Gallery website.

Photograph above: Jane Burton – Nightwood 3, 2026. 75 x75 cm inkjet print.

Bett Gallery. Hobart until 7 November 2026