Olive Burgess
The Weather and What Is explores my lived experience as a lesbian woman within a dualistic society, working to dismantle dominant Western narratives that marginalise queer, embodied, and ecological ways of knowing. It challenges reductive notions of the woman’s body as solely reproductive or passive. Instead, natural desire, time, and othered temporalities are foregrounded—spaces where nature and queerness meet. Engaging a visual motif of hyper-cropped images of my body, my garden, or the sky, the exhibition spotlights the essential, innate patterns found across both nature and a lesbian experience, as well as historical representations of humanity, as found in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. This project is a convergence of both my studio practice and ongoing research, particularly drawing on the ecofeminist writing on queer ecology and Bosch’s surreal ecologies. At its core, the weather and what is makes central a lesbian experience within a world shaped by dualisms—mind/body, nature/culture, useful/redundant, productive/wasted, man/woman.

Full, generous, focused, and sensual, the weather and what is opens space for a re-imagining of intimacy, ecology, history, and embodiment beyond dominant cultural frames.

Find the exhibition Essay Text here

 Canberra Contemporary, Platform Gallery

27 March - 26 April 2026





Photo above: Photographer Fiona Little courtesy of Canberra Contemporary





The Weather and What Is, 2026