The Work of Jane Burton
Ghosts aplenty haunt these walls. Ghosts of memories and lost desires; ghosts of family and ghosts of adolescent dreams. If there was one cohesive factor linking the distinctly disparate works in Jane Burton’s major survey show, ‘Eye of the Beholder’, it was the sense of the solitary, of the artist very much as the lone figure on a sense of self-discovery.
While she has become renowned for her shadowy and mysterious female nudes, many of the most powerful works on show eschewed the human figure; a vacant underground parking space, an empty hospital bath, a linoleum-clad floor in a deserted house. There is a palpable sense of loss in these images; they are cavities screaming for warmth. But even when Burton does portray the figure, it is a chimera, not so much idealised as yearning—what may be a masturbatory scene has a sense of longing and introspection that counters any sense of overt eroticism. Indeed, this is the oddity of Burton’s oeuvre, for all the young naked and semi-naked women, sensual as they may be, there is a coolness and distance always at play. They may be the supposed victim of the hidden voyeur, but a chilling distance is inevitably established. Burton somehow ensures that her subject knows her power—you can look, but don’t come too close.
Burton’s survey found a suitable home in the neo-Victorian grandeur of the Glen Eira City Council gallery, a building that itself feels haunted. In terms of contemporary artists, Burton’s show follows similarly well-curated surveys at this space of such artists as Stieg Persson and Louise Hearman, which also revealed the extraordinary developments of their careers.
The earliest works on show, some... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline