Harry Nankin & Annie Mairead Hunter and Rachael Wenona Guy & Andy Jackson

Distant Kin is a visual and literary exhibition by four artists – Harry Nankin, Annie Mairead Hunter Rachael Wenona Guy and Andy Jackson. All four artists live and work in Central Victoria.

There are two sections to the exhibition.

The first section is a collaboration called Elegy – between Harry Nankin and Annie Mairead Hunter. Elegy comprises fifty toned gelatine silver films exposed by contact on moonless nights by ambient starlight under borrowed astronomical glass plates at Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee. The metamorphosis of invisible silver halides into dark metal image chemically triggered by absorption of the ancient ambient ‘light of the universe’ means the picture-carrying surface of each of these films is effectively a membrane of congealed starlight. The films have been laser-cut into circles and encapsulated in Mylar envelopes. The envelopes are laser-engraved with the words of Elegy written by poet Annie Mairead Hunter who has responded to the work with her poetry.

The second section is titled Pretty/Ugly and is a collaboration between visual artist Rachael Wenona Guy & poet Andy Jackson. Wenona Guy has combined fragments of famous paintings by Flemish masters and Baroque painters as her starting point she has developed twelve digital collages that explore her ambivalence and fascination towards devotional art and love of early portraiture. She states, “I have always felt strangely attracted to and repulsed by painting from these periods, particularly the dark and heightened drama of suffering and the muscular corporeality of religious subject matter. It is like gazing into a distant cultural window on notions of prettiness and ugliness both aesthetic and moral from the lens of the present day – an encounter full of mystery and uncharted reckoning.” Andy says, “I found responding to these artworks both daunting and thrilling. There was no way to directly translate their complex, visceral tableaux into descriptive language; instead, I focused on their emotional, energetic atmospheres, drawing out an implied narrative of unspecified injury, grief, bewilderment, or transformation. I wrote in the second person, to suggest how such moments are common to us all, and prose-poems, as all-encompassing containers for uncontainable experience.”

Harry Nankin, Distant Kin 20, 2025