Heidi Yardley - Trick of the light

Jan Murphy Gallery is pleased to present the new exhibition by Heidi Yardley, Trick of the Light.

"My paintings are driven by an attraction to images that feel both familiar and strange; images that hover at the threshold between seduction and discomfort, memory and invention, presence and disappearance. Across works made between 2005 and 2025, I have returned consistently to the uncanny as a psychological and pictorial space. My practice has long drawn on found imagery from vintage magazines, film stills and printed ephemera, particularly material from the 1970s, which I use not to illustrate nostalgia but to unsettle it and expose the latent tensions, desires and anxieties embedded in images of glamour and femininity. This interest in the unstable relationship between memory, identity and the image has remained central to my work." - Heidi Yardley, 2026

Heidi Yardley has been a finalist in numerous significant Australian art prizes including the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the UQ Art Museum National Artists' Self-Portrait Prize, the Percival Portrait Painting Prize, and the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. She exhibits regularly in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, and her work is held in major public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, University of Queensland Art Museum, Bendigo Art Gallery, and Art Gallery of Ballarat.