Nell

2025

Face Everything
190 pages
23.5 x 16.5 cm
Softcover
Supported by Creative Victoria
Published by Heide Museum of Modern Art and Gunn Taylor Printers

Accompanying the exhibition Nell: Face Everything, curated by Lesley Harding, this richly illustrated publication features writing by Hannah Gadsby, Lesley Harding, Elspeth Pitt and Nell.

Celebrating three decades of creative practice, this survey exhibition sees the artist Nell transform the iconic Heide Modern building into a lively and deeply personal world inhabited by her extended family of characters and ghostly spirits. The former home of Heide founders John and Sunday Reed has been reimagined as a nest and sanctuary; a living, breathing environment that is a place of shelter, memory, and shared experience.

Incorporating found domestic objects alongside references to natural motifs from the Heide gardens—such as birds, snakes, apples, eggs and leaves—the exhibition features tapestries, paintings, sculptures and intimate works that allude to the Reeds’ vision of their house as a ‘gallery to be lived in’. Within this setting the artworks become charged with Nell’s reflections on subjects ranging from life cycles and animism to pop culture, rock ’n’ roll, religion and art history.