The Weather and What Is
Written: Olive Burgess, 2026

I acknowledge the land on which I made this work, Ngunnawal Gadigal and Wangal, and all ancestors past, present and emerging.

“The garden was so beautiful, so liquid somehow, that it was hard to drag myself away. What arrogance to think that this was not reality too.”1

^{The Weather and What Is, as is the story from the start. The weather as is the day. And tomorrow, too. The weather as is the fact. My presence is also fact. The weather on the garden— the weather as is making and breaking it. The garden as is time, as is the coming and going of rain, of sun, often wind. In the garden my living is alive. My unborn a projection. What is a body if not making babies? And what is a garden if it is the baby? What is life if there is only a garden to show for it? And what is it to be a Lesbian in a continued history of dualism and hetero-preference? What is a framed work with un-tethered protocols? What is a tiny print on a mass of paper?

The Weather and What is holds an interrelating montage of key concepts found across art history, printmaking, queer ecology and the artist’s lived experience. 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. This body of work posits Burgess’ garden as kin, alongside her body to centralise the Lesbian experience inside a western lens shaped by dualism. It is founded on an investigation into Heironymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, understood as a reference to historical, non-secular representation of desire within an image of evolutionary abundance. Concurrently, an assessment takes place of Imogen King’s Un Petit Retrait (2019) where 18th century paintings read emblematic of female sexuality, and is supported by person-garden relationships explored in Olivia Laing’s, The Garden Against Time (2025).

The historical and present-time evidence of queer ecology is core to the exhibition’s consideration. As too, the subject of the garden, which is positioned in the gallery space as a site being transcribed. In it, cyclical time, desire and natural non-duality are held in open hands. This reversal becomes material. Lengthy editions are rejected, alongside other print standards. The works are not made for reproduction. And perhaps, neither is she. Further, Burgess abandons the utilitarian, reproductive reputation of printmaking with 1/1 editions and a presentation of the garden as what she has birthed, made and cared for. As a woman of childbearing age, her utility and her sexuality are both revving at the gates. The complexities of her Lesbian experience made known, curious, objectified and critiqued. Her usefulness and adequacy as a woman becomes a subject, amplified. A child—surely, but When? Most importantly, How? And maybe also Why? Burgess suggests as Laing surrenders; where the curse and the diamond are one in the same. Perhaps where there is no distinction afterall. Where ““the apple of knowledge had been plucked and maybe the knowledge was sexuality… fruitful paradise of first love, when the body itself becomes the garden.”2

Further, particular conventional standards for printmaking are intentionally made non-essential in the exhibition. In Top/Bottom, press bed signals are transferred as an emboss and traditions of signing are ignored. Here, standards are intentionally abandoned to accentuate a diversion from standard itself where results do not lead to cancelled legitimacy. The sky's ambiguity is almost made questionable by the presence of the word “top” and “bottom” above and below the photogravure image. The sky is a visual for the atmospheric conditions of a moment in history which has carried through to the present day. In Top/Bottom the sky becomes subject, and the presence of both printmaking and queer colloquialism is married.

Running in pairs either side of the gallery space, seven small hyper-cropped images are hosted generously on large sheets of paper. Each image depicts interior scenes. An undressing, two bodies close, a sharp gaze from a child, a reclined reader. The cropped aspect ratio forces time in their reading and each image highlights coded narratives that sequence a story, or a lifetime. The private sphere is concealed and still, completely revealed. A generosity is at hand. King’s reading on “Private Reading in the Art of Eighteenth-Century France” documents the innate intimacy and mirrored discovery of a woman’s desire and sexuality evidenced in her act of reading. In her thesis, King investigates 18th century French paintings which “depicted women in their reading, and made subject “a saturated and free interiority.”3 In this, King finds “the private is thus a place for ‘self-discvory’”4—self-discovery being fertile ground for a relationship with one's internal world. An internal world which is home to complex, interrelating flora. All engaging, breathing, moving and morphing with and on top of one another. Existing in symbiosis, not always of course, but often. An internal world where self discoveries lead onto provocations of innate desire. Self-discovery as in self governance.}^{Lesbian colloqualisms are more specifically present within the suite The Weather and What Is, with references to positions of rest, particular flowers grown in the garden, moments of undress and reading as indications of non-hetero narratives of across nature and sexuality. Printed in CMYK, the works’ images are made of halftone layers, all interrelating, all separate. In its process alone, printing in halftone with CMYK process colours represents essentiality that pertains to the parts of the whole. Each layer speaks to one thing while still separate— together they are something. The process engages its material in biomimicry in the same way a garden unfolds, in a way, companion planting. All parts of the whole work in symbiosis, across non-homogenised particles. In a garden, if cared for over many seasons, the othered bodies pertainin}g to each garden bed rarely cancel each other— rather they nourish both above and below ground. In CMYK processes, there is a counter to hegemonic duality, where four become one and without one, two or three have potential to be read, but never as wholly as the four. Fascia-like, the image becomes a spectacle of information, placed delicately inside a generosity of paper. The works and their material choices embody a deep generosity, pertaining further to parts of Lesbian culture.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Heironymous Bosch between 1490-1515 is a three panel triptych which sits within a window-like frame and unfolds to reveal a painted depiction of the story of Adam and Eve where a queer curiosity paints a world full of edgeless reverence for living. Following that, on the third panel, a depiction of hell. The painting centres its changes around the joy in desire, and engages the viewer to wonder, “At what point does desire become illicit and unnatural?”5 It is alleged that the painting is a meditation on The Garden of Eden and other fables of civilisation before desire, or before dualism.6 “Free from every care except to enjoy their loyal and loving pleasures…they well knew the saying… the one which dominates always separates them.”7 The painting platforms the garden as an arena of the world-becoming. It is both referential and fictional, a reading drenched in ideas of queer ecology would not be easily dismissed. Its centre panel, the most abundant in both colour and size, presents the garden as full, abundant and rich with diversity.

On the gallery’s distant wall, a box sits as if a tabernacle. Don’t Keep Me Quiet is an image made object. With its door slightly ajar, its invitation is tender. Upon visiting the work at close proximity, shot on Colour positive 4x5 sheet film, an image pictures a small bouquet of flowers from the garden—a varietal Amaranth nicknamed Love Lies Bleeding for its profoundly tall, evocative drape. The flowers are cradled by someone, their face and body concealed - out of frame. The garden is the subject however the image is of the garden and its companion. Someone in the audience opens the door abruptly, someone glances gently. The box of promise, a lightbox, is waiting and on, unchanged by perception regardless. The work’s title is taken from associate Lesbian Charlotte Day Wilson’s song Quiet (Patchwork, 2026), in which she speaks to the potential for her lover to keep their connection quiet. To not evoke curiosity, questions, or critique. To stay underwraps until it's safe enough to emerge. In Don’t Keep Me Quiet, the garden-as-kin glows, gently asking for public recognition of its worth as a meaningful outpouring of care and time. Asking for recognition of the symbiosis across relationships, time and the weather. A quiet commitment, the garden is held as emblematic of abundant convergence—a common discussion in queer ecology—marking the equal qualities of both humans and nature.

Down the centre of the gallery space, a baptism takes place. Having come up within the Catholic school system, Burgess is acutely aware of the narrative structure around heteronormativity— in both preference and in socialised views of nature. Her research occasionally revises the stories of the Old Testament, as well as their gaps. These stories are known to have once been abstract, perhaps metaphorical, and now govern a substantial amount of western world views. Of particular interest, the story of the Garden of Eden and humanity’s woman-powered demise into desire and thus destruction. Roman Catholicism in all of its history seems to have centered itself around an exclusive, all consuming ethos where desire will have you sliding to hell, or worse. While this is not necessarily being questioned in The Weather and What Is, a revision is undertaken. Baptismal Font is central, its presence in the space holds ambiguity with intention—a bird bath or a sacramental object?

The process of Baptism is a rite of passage, a gateway, a consummation. The first of four sacraments undertaken within Roman Catholicism to ensure your devotion to God, Jesus maybe, and Mary, if you dare to let her cross your mind. During a baptism a baby is typically in the white gown of purity worn all day and then metaphorically until your next great consummation—marriage. In the bowl, the baby is held in the water long enough for all sins to be obscured. In this room, Baptismal Font cradles Wholly Holy, while a different process, a first sacrament is undertaken. With no gown or priest, it is not a baptism necessarily. Instead, across time and means of its own, water creeps up the rice paper. The materiality of the paper allows an eventual shift in the work itself. While supported by copper—a companion of both printmaking and gardening practices—Wholly Holy drapes, buckles and tears, evolving as a garden would. The Etymology as described by Laing comes to mind: ““Paradeisos” used in the old testament to refer to both the garden of eden and heaven itself…By the 13th century it had come also to mean ‘a place of surpassing beauty or delight’...The garden came first, heaven trailing in its wake.”8

Like paradise, the sacrament is inverted, tenderised, and the old story is peeled open. Between Wholly Holy and Baptismal Font, there is a ripeness. There is both fertility and rotting. Processional, reverential, gentle and generous, The Weather and What Is is a conversation with both the world and the artist, spanning time and a milieu of temporal realities. Familiar to queer associates, tender to those in other worlds, the space becomes a world to visit and then depart, not unlike a garden.Time loosens and it lingers—like the weather itself, always there and ever affecting. As is.

1. Laing, O. The garden against time: In search of a common paradise, 2025. London, UK: Picador. 35
2. Laing, O. The garden against time, 2025. 35
3. King, I. Un Petit Retrait: Private Reading in the Art of Eighteenth-Century France, 2019. University of Sydney. 9
4. King, I. Un Petit Retrait, 2019. 9
5. Carroll, M.D. and Bosch, H. Hieronymus Bosch: Time and transformation in the Garden of Earthly Delights. 2022. New Haven: Yale University Press. 133
6. Carroll, M.D. and Bosch, H. Hieronymus Bosch, 2022. 100
7. Carroll, M.D. and Bosch, H. Hieronymus Bosch, 2022. 97
8. Laing, O. The garden against time, 2025. 31

The Weather and What Is, 2026