Thinly Veiled: Blurring the Thresholds
Hannah Presley’s 2025 exhibition the veil opens a gateway into the liminal: a space between here and there, before and after, spoken and unspoken. Whether cultural, political, religious, or spiritual, most people recognise this place. Sometimes we deny it; other times we protect the knowledge that arises from it. This in-between space is the veil.
Curated with Isabella Hone-Saunders, the exhibition gathered six artists — Hayley Millar Baker, Hannah Gartside, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Glenda Nicholls, Lisa Waup, and Lena Yarinkura — whose works speak across thresholds and invite cross-cultural conversation.
Millar Baker’s film Eternity the Butterfly, commissioned for the exhibition, completes a trilogy with Nyctinasty and The Umbra. In 2023, she described Nyctinasty as “a contemporary connection to spiritual space that Indigenous people are privy to, having spirits talk to them, the ability to talk back to spirits, whether that’s vocal or it’s just a sense.” Eternity the Butterfly extends these reflections on permanence and impermanence, sleep and wake, life and death.
In a conversation in July 2025, Presley described how Millar Baker’s films form the threads binding the artists in the exhibition, creating a foundation that holds and protects them. The works take a cross-cultural look at the limits of what can be said, seen, and shared.
