Mary Nolan’s photographed family life is on display at Bundanon

Bundanon, the art museum on 1,000 hectares of the New South Wales south coast that was once home to Arthur and Yvonne Boyd, is showing 48 previously overlooked photographs by Lady Mary Nolan (née Boyd) as part of an exhibition that celebrates the artistic careers of the Boyd women.

The images, unearthed at the National Library of Australia, foreground a family devoted to art, travel, creativity and the outdoors. Mary Nolan, who had four children with her first husband, the artist John Perceval, before moving to London and marrying Sidney Nolan in 1978, was a painter and potter but is here highlighted for her photography.

Exhibition curator Sophie O’Brien says Nolan was “clearly always at the ready to capture striking visual moments” and that her intimate portraits of family members are both loving and clear‑eyed. The photographs include portraits and everyday scenes of Nolan’s children — Matthew, Celia, Alice and Tessa — many of whom became artists, and images of the broader Boyd circle at work and at leisure in studios, gardens and on travels in France and London.

O’Brien points to images such as Tessa painting on Hampstead Heath and family picnics near Anduze as examples of how Nolan recorded the role of landscape and domestic life in the family’s creative practice.

Key Topics

Culture, Mary Nolan, Bundanon, New South Wales, Hidden Line, National Library