Ode: Margaret Olley and Sally Anderson is a celebration of important still life paintings by Margaret Olley (1923–2011) together with new work by Gadigal/Sydney-based artist Sally Anderson.
During her 2025 residency at the Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio, Sally embarked on a new body of work that responds not only to Margaret Olley’s remarkable still life paintings featured in Ode: Margaret Olley and Sally Anderson, but also to selected objects from the re-creation of Olley’s home studio. Interweaving deeply personal experiences and themes of domesticity, care, maternity, and mortality within her work, Anderson invites us to reconsider Olley’s still life paintings in a new light.
A Tweed Regional Gallery initiative. The Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio is supported by benefactor Mr. Tim Fairfax AC via the Tweed Regional Gallery Foundation Ltd.
“Olley’s still life paintings feature and appear as postcards or portals within mine, just as Cézanne, Matisse, and Manet (to name a few) appear within hers. I’ve deliberately arranged objects borrowed from Olley’s reconstructed home–studio alongside personally significant items within my compositions to give them new context and meaning. I think a lot about arranging—how we arrange thoughts, words, time, memories, clothes, households, feelings, gardens, furniture, objects, colour—and how rearranging the order of things ultimately shifts meaning, revealing new truths, narratives, and histories.”
The Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence Studio is a live-in studio supporting artists from across Australia, encouraging connection between artist, community, and place.
IMAGE:
SALLY ANDERSON
Study of MO’s still life in green 1947 with a banksia for dad, GM orchid and PP Bathers postcard 2025
acrylic on polycotton
137 × 153 cm