There is a particular kind of unease in entering a room where nothing appears to be happening.
No movement. No crowd. Nothing demanding attention.
Only a figure standing quietly looking back at you.
The Heather B. Swann exhibition at UNSW immediately held that peculiar sensation of stepping somewhere you had been before, although you knew you hadn’t.
The room seems to wait.
And for a moment you have the uncomfortable feeling that you have interrupted something.
Somewhere, an ambient sound is travelling through the galleries. A low, echoing presence, almost familiar, almost Twin Peaks, though nothing quite resolves into recognition. You begin to listen for something that isn’t there.
Then another room.
Rock heads.
Green men.
Frogs.
They sit together without explanation, as though they have been waiting for you to arrive, or perhaps have been waiting for each other. Their faces are strangely still. Human enough to invite recognition, removed enough to resist it.
You feel that slight unease of being watched without being able to see who is watching.
There is something of De Chirico here: the empty piazza, the sculpture left behind, the peculiar feeling that an event has just occurred or is about to occur, but you have arrived in the interval.
The spaces between things become charged.
A simple form arches across a wall.
A crow watches a figure.
A room opens into another room.
Nothing connects, and yet everything seems connected.
This is how a dream sometimes feels before it becomes a story. Not a sequence of events but a handful of images held in some unknown relationship: a room, a face, an animal, a passageway, a sound from somewhere beyond the walls.
You keep walking.
The exhibition becomes less like something being shown to you and more like somewhere you have wandered into.
Something you recognise without knowing from where.
There is no need to understand it.
Perhaps that is what makes it unsettling.
You begin to wonder whether these rooms belong to the gallery at all, or whether you have simply remembered them.
And for a moment, walking among the quiet figures, you have the peculiar sensation that the dream has not begun.
You have entered it halfway through.
Notitia — attending to the unsettled places where images, memory and feeling remain open before they become explanations.
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