“I recently revisited the NGA and looked at that placard, and a portal opened up in my mind. I wasn’t at the paintings any more.”
She was thinking about the collaboration between Nolan and Reed, and about whether Reed was more artistically responsible for the paintings than she is given the credit, as well as being involved in the works’ creation simply by being Nolan’s patron, lover and mentor. When she looked at the paintings and the placard, she felt the story behind the brushstrokes.
“When you know that story, it’s bigger than the artwork itself. It’s time and history. Many creators make one artwork – it’s more collaborative than we think.”
Shiels herself is an expert in collaboration and has amassed an impressive body of work after training at Victorian College of the Arts.
She has just finished playing Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire) in Melbourne and recently brought stunning vitality to Sybylla Melvyn, the headstrong heroine of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career at Belvoir St Theatre. She was also an alternate performer taking on the astonishing feat of theatre that is STC’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Kip Williams – now heading to Broadway with Sarah Snook (Succession) starring.
Each of those roles showcase the complexities, realities and interiorities of women – or defy gendered categories to explore the tension between what in our gendered, public selves is real and what is performative. Shiels says these are the stories and characters about which she is most passionate.
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Reed has long been part of Shiels’ artistic journey. She still remembers her first visit to Heide Museum of Modern Art as a 20-year-old arts student. It blew her away.
“Our national galleries and state galleries are designed specifically to house art, whereas the Heide building were homes. They’re lived-in art galleries. They hold ghosts, I suppose, of the past.”
In this return season of Sunday Shiels will walk back through time, touch the art we’re used to seeing hang so politely on gallery walls, and bring it back to irrepressible, undeniable life.
