14/09/2026
What Continued Afterwards
Artist residencies offer a particular kind of time and attention: an opportunity to step outside the routines of everyday practice, work intensively in a new environment, and follow ideas without necessarily knowing where they will lead. Their impact is often understood through what is made during the residency, but some of their most significant effects emerge later—in the questions, methods and ways of working that continue afterwards.
What Continued Afterwards traces the ongoing influence of Hayley Megan French’s residency at Bundanon in late 2023. During the residency, French walked, photographed, drew, painted and wrote, looking closely for patterns in the landscape. The Polaroids made there, and the works on paper that followed, began an investigation into repetition, rhythm and the structures that emerge through sustained attention.
Over the following years, this way of looking continued in the studio and at home. Patterns first observed in the landscape were repeated, enlarged, layered and reworked, while the investigation gradually expanded beyond the visual—towards patterns of memory, domestic life, motherhood, care and everyday experience.
With the exception of one resolved triptych on paper, the works brought together in What Continued Afterwards are process works: Polaroids, sketches, studies and experiments that would ordinarily remain in the studio. Presented together, they make visible the usually unseen work of developing an artistic practice—the repetition, testing and accumulation through which one investigation leads to another.
What Continued Afterwards considers how a concentrated period of experimentation can continue to unfold through an artist’s practice long after the residency itself has ended. The exhibition follows the development of a visual investigation into an ongoing way of thinking.
