Maudie passed away early December 2025.
I write this in reflection.
June 2026

 

I first contacted Maudie in July 2021and between Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns we met at Glendale, Maudie Maudie Palmer’s family home of more than four decades. We sat in the ‘good room’, and we talked for several hours over a sandwich, a slice of cake, and cups of tea, about art, her art-filled life, her escapades. Maudie was generous with her time and her authenticity was warming, her beauty astoundingly, youthfully vivacious, and she was selflessly as interested in hearing about me as in being the subject herself. As we chatted glimpses of a much younger woman were revealed in her expression and in her laughter. It was this living continuity in Maudie that I hoped to record. I left Glendale that day with a beautiful wurun (Manna Gum) sapling, lovingly nurtured from seed by Maudie, strapped to the passenger seat of my convertible. We made the pictures in March 2022, and the sapling, now four years older, grows tall and vigorous in my garden - one day it may reach fifty metres, a monumental reminder of Maudie and Glendale. 

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Maudie Palmer AO No.1 2022 was photographed in Glendale’s cobblestone-floored, 130-year-old stables. There was a studio apartment attached where many artists over the years had lived and stayed, so being in these surroundings felt important to Maudies story. Whilst hair and make up was in full swing in the house Di and I set up a black velvet backdrop and positioned lights. At first the set up felt conservative, maybe old fashioned, but on Maudie’s arrival, this make shift studio with its bright lights and theatrics became Maudie’s stage, and its surroundings her theatre. The set was spare and simple signifying her stature, and suggestive of an openness and kindness, qualities that I wanted to emphasise for this portrait. I chose to photograph Maudie there with my Hasselblad H2 and Phase IQ180 digital back, a demanding camera but precise, which rendered in the face a gravity suited to my subject—Maudie chose this as the opportunity to wear her Order of Australia badge; “Everyone’s got one,” she said.

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Though shot digitally, the formal portrait print was redolent of the analogue “glossy” colour portraits of the 1980’s revered by photographers Parkinson, Snowdon and Bailey—still known to us today by surnames only in recognition of their notability. Their era in photographic history aligned well with Maudie and her days at Heide; and with me, having in 1985 visited Heide on a high school excursion to see works by Picasso exhibited under Maudie’s directorship, just as I was contemplating a career in the art of photography.

 

To embody this aura of legacy and stature a negative was made from the digital file and printed as a C-Type hand print by Sandy Barnard of Sandy Prints, a style we developed for Through Her Breath 2022, and later for Polly Borland No.1 2025. For Maudie Palmer AO No.1 2022, Sandy introduced a subtle diffusion, a softening that simultaneously highlights and embeds Maudie in the frame in a manner suited to her stature as Director of Heide Gallery.

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Glendale  immediately impressed me as a home redolent with intelligence and a long creative breath. The Good Room was Maudie’s favourite room, she commented that it had never been photographed, so I felt it important to record it, to place Maudie within the room in a way that would feel neither staged nor casual, to relate her to the objects she had spent a lifetime acquiring and adoring. In the Good Room I returned to film. The Kodak Portra 400 frames were made on my Rolleiflex 6008 (c.1992). Presented as a triptych, the film rebate is left visible, and the warmth of the Portra palette answered the room’s colours faithfully. One figure felt insufficient to hold what Maudie represented within her space, her home, so she occupies the room repeatedly. The three poses were those that I had observed Maudie adopting habitually during my first visit to Glendale in 2021. 

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The curve of the vase in the Patrick Caulfield framed print that echoes the round mirror; the ‘exclamation mark’ of the lit globe against the gap between the soft translucent lights of the windows; the pile of books, signifying the weight of Maudie’s learning; all balance the bulky form of the fireplace to conjure subconscious connections of fire (ideas) and marble (redolent of the university), while spilling toward us is that glorious and dominant (across the 3 frames) decorative mass of the carpet that connects so vividly with her artistic interests and curatorial creativity (and apparently she trained at the National Gallery art school—now VCA—in sculpture). The tiger looks back (respectfully) at Maudie to bracket the composition, and acts as a symbol of Maudie’s personality. Within the portrait these observations exist simultaneously as a single image. (Dr. James McArdle)

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The panoramic format suited the room’s horizontal sweep, a viewpoint that Maudie enjoyed daily from the second sofa against the wall. The rising movement across the three frames has an upward cadence — almost musical, almost dance — making Maudie’s figure weightless, suggesting the ease that comes with long inhabitation of authority. 

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My direction of Maudie was deliberately restrained. Her sitting, turning, and standing were gestures performed not for the camera, but through familiarity with a space that she had refined—curated in fact—over decades: Persian carpet worn to a warm softness underfoot; and treasured artworks by Patrick Caulfield, James Morrison, Linda Marrinon, John Scurry, and Danie Mallor; A fifty-year-old native maidenhair that usually lived by the side entrance joined other memory-laden objects. The room is itself a portrait of its inhabitant. This is how we actually know a domestic space, as a field of habitual positions, where the body goes without thinking, wearing paths between furniture, pausing at the window. The space is already scored by a life before the camera arrives. The image makes visible the room’s memory of the body,  the positions that the space has called the figure into, all held simultaneously within a single frame. The multiple appearances of Maudie within the interior are not fragmentations of her identity but expansions of it.

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After editing, I presented Maudie with large contact sheets which we marked with paper dots, remnants I’d kept from my analogue days. I then travelled to Sydney to print with Sandy. From three chosen frames we cut the film and reassembled the triptych panorama. It was risky; and in truth, Sandy did the cutting, not me. The cut negatives were placed on the enlarger glass and projected as one onto a length of photographic paper, in a process as deliberate and considered as my making of the images themselves. The final print is large, and appropriate to Maudie’s presence in The Good Room — an extraordinary place, an historic home filled with art and stories.

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The Kodak 400TMY- two black and white frames, Maudie Palmer AO No.3 and Maudie Palmer AO No.4 2022 (In The Good Room, Glendale) introduced a different kind of seeing. The TMY grain is fine enough to hold the shimmer of Maudie’s silk blouse, the gloss of the black skirt pooling at her feet, the texture of the floral sofa, and the weightiness of the books. In black and white the room’s temporal layering becomes more legible; Victorian, modernist, and contemporary objects coexist without hierarchy, as they do in any truly lived-in intellectual home. I was taken by Maudies polka dot blouse that introduced a lightness against the formality of the fireplace and its assembled animal world of squirrel and tiger that evoked Maudie’s wit and her pleasure in the unexpected.

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In acknowledging Maudie’s significance as a curator, the work draws a parallel between curating and the construction of the image itself. Both involve the arrangement of elements within a bounded space to shape how meaning moves through it. Both produce, through accumulated choice, an argument about what deserves to be seen and how. A curator arranges works within a gallery; here the subject, Maudie,  appears to organise herself within the room, her repeated presence structuring the visual and conceptual field she has spent a lifetime shaping, in making the space so personal.

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Maudie Palmer AO shaped the landscape of contemporary art in Australia. Expert in Australian modern and contemporary visual art, she curated at least 200 exhibitions, was Inaugural Director of both Heide Museum of Modern Art, from 1981 to 1996, and of TarraWarra Museum of Art, from 2000 to 2009, conceiving and project-managing new buildings for each. The Herring Island Environmental Sculpture Park and Gallery is among her triumphs. As a Trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria and through service on numerous committees, she committed herself to working with communities and artists to promote the art as a vehicle for social transformation, believing that it embodies ideas that will change and shape environmental and cultural behaviours and legacies for current and future generations.

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The wound of time that a photograph carries. The subject existed. The shutter closed. What remains is the trace of a duration. The portrait proposes permanence while quietly admitting loss. (Roland Barthes)

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In my environmental portraits of Maudie, the Good Room is the site of a presence that endures when the body has departed. Embedded in the objects chosen, the space arranged, the fall of light, are the body, heart and mind that placed them so. Presence does not reside in the figure, but in the field the figure shaped.

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Making a portrait can feel right in one moment and uncertain at another. I am grateful for every moment - whether photographed or not. When I am making a portrait, I don’t always realise its future importance.

My portraits of Maudie reflect her nature as a generous woman radiating and attracting artistic inspiration. With Maudie Palmer, that generosity was present from the very first encounter. Glendale gave me the room. Maudie gave me everything else.

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Journey well, wonderful Maudie.

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Bronwyn Kidd
With gratitude to Maudie Palmer AO

 

 

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Hair and Make Up: Bernadette Fisers

Assistant: Dianna Spriggs

Retouching: Visual Thing

Film Processing and Analogue Printing:
Sandy Barnard, Sandy Prints​​​