Glass Psyche

8 Oct 2013 - 26 Oct 2013
Solo Exhibition - Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane

'In Gerald Durrell's acclaimed short story The Entrance, the protagonist is both haunted and hunted by an apparition that moves without reason or logic, carving itself out of the mirror of recognition. Without recourse to the security of accepted notions of reflection and seeing, the world is called into mutable unease, where accepted and expected desires are shattered.

Heidi Yardley's newest work, Glass Psyche, inhabits this world of benign malevolence, interrupting sylvan glades with carved, unexpected intrusions of displaced beauty that mar the safety of a remembered landscape; that contrast a notion of peacefulness with an unsettling eroticism.

As in the realms of dream, images hover in the foreground, pulling the viewer toward a luminous beauty that belies the sharp edges of both the craft that has seduced them and the comprehension they seek, to deliver a supernatural discord that recalls the gothic displacement of Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve and Angela Carter: the feminine blade of apperception applied to the ideal of colonial possession; the night's sweet whisper of comfort made disquiet.'

- Caleb Cluff, October 2013

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