Nurse Ogilvie’s Bed Sheets Madeleine Peters
Her latest exhibition, ‘Nurse Ogilvie’s Bed Sheets’ has already been crated and dispatched to The Egg & Dart for her forthcoming exhibition in August. The Sydney Contemporary works are drawn from her collection of magazines about hobbies and specific pastimes: bird keeping, African violet and fuschia breeding, model building, and target shooting. In these, she celebrates “the uncomfortably bright flash lighting, and the homemade backdrops. It’s more an overlapping (or just lapping?) of cyclical reflection, and images and stories of place, belief, purpose, and devotion.” Call it synchronicity, or just plain roll-of-the-dice chance. I had recently finished re-reading Australian academic Victoria Carruthers’s definitive monograph Dorothea Tanning: Transformations (Lund Humphries, 2020) on American surrealist Dorothea Tanning, when I jumped on the train from Melbourne to Warrnambool, to interview Peters.
Four hours later, I was standing in her centre-of-town
