Heidi Yardley works with found images to create scenes of mysterious temporality. Often painted infaded hues, her work holds nostalgic, elusive qualities that transcend time and place. Yardley is an avid collector of vintage books, catalogues and magazines from the 1970s, and her work is often influenced by the feminine aesthetics of the decade in which she was born. Yardley’s paintings feature female subjects with their faces obscured, at once familiar in aesthetic andstrange in their ambiguous poses. On the surface these works evoke the glamour of old Hollywood orclassic film noir, but on closer inspection – beneath the veneer of flowing hair - these uncanny, anonymousportraits hint at the darker psychological narratives around female stereotypes of the era.from the National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne Now 2023 exhibition catalogue