Heather Miller
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THE EVENING PRIMROSES
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The evening primroses! is a show in conversation with the first chapter of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, from which the painting titles are borrowed. I wanted to make effusive paintings to reflect Clarissa Dalloway’s experience of the florist shop where “she would buy the flowers herself”. In the shop she both observes and feels the flowers and the moths. The work also contains her sense of being “outside, looking on” and growing invisible with age, especially as a woman past child-bearing years; of being fundamentally ephemeral, and soon to be “laid out like a mist”.
The paintings gather three motifs – flowers, moths, and moons. The flowers stand in for our recollections, our sensations, our vibrant emotional lives, and our very alive-ness. The moths embody the part of us drawn to beauty and light, the part that races about, spinning in and out of what we find most lovely for the time we exist. The moon suggests waxing and waning over the course of a human life. The moon is a calm and motherly presence. The moon illuminates and conceals, and ushers us quietly through our night.
Heather Miller is a self-taught artist and mother of two, living and working on unceded Cammeraygal land in Sydney. She was a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award in 2020 and 2023, the 2022 Salon des Refuses and the 2023 Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, emerging artist category. She was also a semi-finalist in the 2021 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. This is her first solo show in a gallery. Heather’s focus is usually on portraiture and the human figure. the evening primroses! marks an expansion of her practice. She seeks to carry over into this new body of work her obsession with the emotional quality of colour and her intent to paint in a way that is sensitive and tender.
