The Hidden Line: Art of the Boyd Women
Bundanon Trust, 2025

While viewing the Bundanon Collection, I was particularly drawn to Lucy Boyd Beck’s landscapes for their absence of a horizon line — the meeting of land, water, sky, and a sense of place. Lucy’s compositions do not locate the viewer through a fixed eye level or the conventional separation of foreground and background. Instead, they create a space that feels intuitive and open.

I have often thought of beading as a medium bound to straight lines and rigid structures, and usually worked within those parameters. Lucy’s paintings inspired me to create my first work using a more organic compositional approach. This work draws on my time as a resident artist at Bundanon while pregnant, when the ground was sometimes moving with black and brown snakes. Its swirling forms, bent lines, and river-like patterns respond to Lucy’s paintings and aim to collapse perspective, bringing the viewer into close contact with the image.

The exhibition was curated by Sophie O’Brien and includes essays by Sophie O’Brien, Anne Ryan, Lisa Slade, Helen Hughes, and Jennifer Higgie.