An art critic is overcome with equal parts smugness and shame in the event of discovering an artist who had been under their nose the whole time. I had one such encounter last Saturday, when, as a Brunswick flâneur, I wandered up Moreland Road’s narrow, overgrown footpath to Haydens, where I came face to face with Janenne Eaton’s paintings for the first time. At face value, this may sound normal enough, except that Eaton is in her seventies and has had a decades long career showing in some of the best-known Australian galleries and institutions.
When I visit Haydens, it is the first day of Eaton’s exhibition Evidence—a stratigraphy, which presents twelve paintings completed between 2009 and 2022. The eponymous Hayden (Stewart) sits in his office, bemasked, having only recently overcome the Covid he picked up at David Eagan’s Neon Parc opening. To be sure, acquiring Covid at this event was perhaps the ultimate tick of inner-Melbourne art world belonging. If you didn’t get Covid at Dave Egan’s 2022 show, then where were you?
Amelia Winata is a Narrm/Melbourne-based arts writer and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Melbourne.
