Where this stands

The exhibition opens at HOTA on 6 November 2027, which is thirteen months away. This is the first entry in what will be a record of getting there — paintings as they are finished, the novel, the catalogue, and the room itself.

The body of work is well advanced, and the six movements that will structure the room — Screen Test, Surface, Dressing Room, Film Noir, Aftermath, Nocturne — are settled. The Woolstore and Inchcolm Sessions, the two shoots most of the paintings are built from, are done: period costume, studio lighting rebuilt from first principles, and real rooms in Brisbane buildings that still remember what they were.

The novel is drafted. It runs to about 54,000 words across thirty-two chapters and follows Evelyn St Clair from a desert hotel in 1949 to a drive east out of Bel Air in 2024. It is intended for release late in 2027, alongside the exhibition.

The catalogue has its three voices. Charles Casillo is writing the foreword, April Clemmer an essay on the craft that built the image and what its glamour gave back, and the remaining essays are mine.

And the room itself is now a real conversation rather than a private one. Concept visualisations of the installation — a single dark room with one lit dressing table at its centre, a projection, working material laid flat on trestles — have been shown to HOTA, and their team has been generous about helping build it.

Filming has begun as well. We are shooting in the studio — the preparation, the sessions themselves, the ordinary work that produces the photographs the paintings are built from — alongside archival material, including behind-the-scenes footage shot on set by Loretta Young, who is one of the women this exhibition is about. More photoshoots are scheduled through next year. What the finished film becomes is not settled; what it is for is to record how the work was made, and not only what it produced.

More as it happens.