'The Words You Whispered' — Honours in Curating at Monash University
The Words You Whispered is a curated exhibition presented as part of my Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in Curating at Monash University in 2026. Bringing together works by Donna Bailey, Parker Lev Dupain, Frank Hinder and Jas Shalimar, alongside poetry by Eden Blake and text by Georgia Vanselow, the exhibition considers intimacy through touch, memory, inheritance, care and the body.
Taking its title from Blake’s poem Carole Grace, the exhibition begins from a question of what remains when physical proximity ends. Rather than approaching intimacy solely through interpersonal relationships, The Words You Whispered considers how intimacy can persist through objects, materials, gestures, resemblance and memory. The exhibition became an opportunity to explore how curating might create relationships between works without requiring them to communicate a single, fixed meaning.
The maternal operates as one of the exhibition’s central registers, but is deliberately expanded beyond biological motherhood. Care, attachment, nurture, genealogy and transmission become ways of thinking about relationships between bodies, generations and materials. Donna Bailey’s ambiguous, fragmented figures and Parker Lev Dupain’s intimate confrontation with the maternal body sit alongside Frank Hinder’s historical representation of motherhood and Jas Shalimar’s bodily and genealogical forms. Their differences are important: the exhibition does not attempt to resolve these works into one definition of intimacy, but allows tensions and gaps between them to remain visible.
Two of the works in the exhibition, by Donna Bailey and Frank Hinder, were generously loaned from the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) Collection. I am particularly grateful to Emma Neale and the MUMA Collection team for their support in making these works available, coordinating their installation and deinstallation, and for giving me the opportunity to spend time in the Collection Store. Working with the Collection became an important part of my development as a curator, allowing me to consider how historical and contemporary works can be placed into new relationships through exhibition-making.
This was particularly important to my Honours research, which asks: what remains of intimacy when physical proximity ends? Through the exhibition, I became increasingly interested in intimacy not simply as something represented, but as something produced through proximity — between artworks, materials, viewers and the exhibition space itself.
The Words You Whispered was ultimately a first iteration of an ongoing curatorial investigation. It allowed me to test how an exhibition can hold together fragmented experiences of the body, memory, gender, motherhood and inheritance while leaving room for ambiguity. Moving forward, I will continue developing these ideas through my Honours research and subsequent iterations of the project, particularly considering how the relationships between works, space and viewer might be strengthened, complicated and opened further for the graduate exhibition.
Rather than offering a conclusion, The Words You Whispered proposes intimacy as something continually negotiated between presence and absence, holding and letting go, and the tangible and intangible.
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