Siri Hayes reflects on being more in touch with nature in a group of new works that respond to Heide’s abundant gardens and parkland, a remnant green sanctuary in inner-suburban Melbourne. 

it is winter here, the branches of the trees are bare the sky is ever so high, above
there is space for a procession
amidst the rockery, masked 

Siri Hayes’s recent show of photographs and embroidery, All you knit is love is tricky to write about as I was left quite satisfied feeling the love of family, nature, and life in general.

A bay of musicians
hung over,
slung over nets,
asleep in the bay.

Hayes often photographs unglamorous places but the visitors are contented and productive.

In a week-long residency at Monash University’s Gippsland Centre for Art and Design, Hayes collaborated with students, staff and locals in a series of photographic shoots taken en plein air. Meanings and metaphors pile up in these photographs, which reiterate a myriad of European landscape traditions along with Australia’s own history of representation after colonisation. They provoke smiles of recognition of an art historical roll-call of artists and pictorial conventions – Poussin’s ordered stage, Buvelot’s borrowed paysage intime, the green-grey poetry of late Corot and Nolan’s modernist planes …

With their aesthetic combination of lyricism, urban vacancy and private sublimity, the pictures achieve a metaphoric value beyond the spectacle. They express the inner majesty of people outside the mainstream, so to speak, the couples and individuals who contemplate a rapport with new nature and probably reflect on the marvel that the spot remains.

Just as the dying days of the campaign trail revealed the environment as a key topic of differentiation between Australia's major political parties, the environment has also been at the forefront of Siri Hayes' mind.