Tinning Street in Brunswick remains a working street—warehouses, roller doors, concrete, a place that offers little indication of what it contains. Neon Parc is set within that strip, easy to pass without noticing. Inside, the conditions shift. A narrow corridor draws the eye forward. Light gathers at its far end. Before any image can be fully grasped, the exhibition has already set its terms: recognition is delayed.
That delay is not incidental. It is the governing rhythm of Anna Higgins’s True Love at Dawn. The works do not offer themselves all at once. They come forward, hesitate, and alter under sustained attention. At first, they cohere through colour: magenta, crimson, yellow, violet. Only afterwards do figures, horizons and fragments of landscape begin to appear. Even then, what appears does not hold in a stable way. A horizon line also reads as a splice. A face begins to surface and is crossed by light. A kiss arrives already veiled. Across the exhibition, the image is neither denied nor delivered. It is held in suspension.
This is what gives the show its seriousness. Higgins is not simply making images of dusk, dawn, atmosphere or longing. She is constructing the conditions under which such states can remain unresolved. The exhibition brings together nine large-scale works made from found 16mm and 8mm motion-picture film, alongside the artist’s own film and photographs of the Victorian alpine region and of sunset and dawn light along the coastline and mountains of Athens. These are layered through double exposure, rephotography and repeated acrylic screenprinting, so that their original narratives dissolve into afterimages of light, gesture and texture. The title, drawn from Yukio Mishima, is exact in this sense: dawn and dusk matter here not as literary ornament, but as unstable perceptual conditions in which form softens and time seems briefly to hesitate.
Higgins’s own trajectory matters because True Love at Dawn feels less like a departure than like a concentration. Trained at the Victorian College of the Arts and later at the Royal Academy Schools in London, she has built a practice across photography, film and printmaking without ever allowing one discipline to settle fully over the others. Recent exhibitions in Melbourne, London, Berlin and New York, together with the Bowness Photography Prize and a formative residency in Athens, have given that practice visibility; this exhibition gives it sharpness. What had previously appeared as a set of affinities—analogue process, atmospheric light, found imagery, painterly surface—comes together here as a fully articulated language.
Light as Structure
The exhibition’s clearest achievement lies in its treatment of light, not as what makes the image visible, but as what unsettles it from within.
The Light of Day (2025) is the most direct statement of this. The work is dominated by an almost punishing field of yellow. A dark horizon line runs across the middle, briefly giving the eye a point of orientation. Then that line changes meaning. It becomes not only horizon but seam: the visible join between two frames of film. In that moment, the work performs one of Higgins’s fundamental operations. The very element that should stabilise the image instead exposes its construction.
This is why the picture never settles into landscape. The yellow does not behave like a descriptive sky or field of sunlight. It behaves like a pressure placed upon the image, a chromatic intensity produced as much by the instability of aged reversal film as by the atmospheric subject it seems to describe. Higgins does not correct those chemical shifts; she lets them remain active. The result is an image in which light appears to have overtaken not only the scene but also the medium that carries it.
Across this yellow field drift white flares and daisy-like forms. They are introduced through screenprinting, yet they do not read as additions merely laid over the photograph. They seem to emerge from the surface itself, hovering between flora, sparks, afterimage and graphic interruption. Their ambiguity is precise. They refuse decorative closure. Above all, they prevent the yellow from becoming radiant in any simple way. The work is beautiful, but never merely beautiful; it is chemically severe, slightly abrasive, and conscious of its own instability.
Early Evening (2025) and Past Pleasure (2026) extend this logic into a different spectrum. In Early Evening, the red sky, distant lights and small bird offer a more recognisable scene, almost a moment of repose. But that repose is immediately complicated. White screenprinted passages move across the image, cutting through the horizon and translating reflected light into rhythm. The magenta cast is not expressive excess but material fact: the consequence of aged film stock in which cyan and yellow have receded. Higgins builds from this transformation rather than repairing it. The result is an image of evening that feels both seen and replayed, as though the scene had passed through time before reaching the eye.
In Past Pleasure, that chromatic instability becomes monumental. The clouds occupy the frame with almost oppressive saturation, and the seam through the centre insists on the film frame as a structural reality. White bursts scatter across the cloud mass, disrupting the atmosphere’s stillness. The work oscillates between sky and afterimage, between weather and optical event. If Early Evening retains the possibility of landscape, Past Pleasure drives that possibility toward a threshold where colour, grain and interruption begin to overtake it.
This is where Higgins’s work enters into dialogue with a broader history of image-making. Her sensitivity to chemical transformation and surface recalls artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans and James Welling, both of whom have treated the photograph as a material event rather than a transparent window. Her horizon, especially in the twilight works, might call up Hiroshi Sugimoto’s sea pictures, though in Higgins the horizon does not tend toward metaphysical calm. It remains damaged, spliced, temporally exposed. The point is not reduction. It is instability. Time does not settle into stillness. It remains fractured within the frame.
At the centre of this group is True Love at Dawn (2025), the title work, which gathers the exhibition’s visual vocabulary into a single image: sea, sky, rising or hovering sun, drifting bursts of light, saturated colour, visible film structure. What makes the work convincing is that it never tips into allegory. Dawn is not treated as revelation or symbolic rebirth. It is treated as a condition in which perception sharpens and loosens at once. The white particles that cross the sky are too dispersed to become stars, too graphic to become natural detail, too integrated to be mere ornament. They suggest motion without narrating it. The image feels less like a captured moment than like the accumulation of several moments suspended together. In that sense, Higgins is closer to the temporal logic of film than to the fixed authority of the photograph. The image does not stop time. It holds time in fragments.
Bodies, Returns, and the Work of Longing
If the skies establish the exhibition’s atmospheric and structural argument, the figurative works bring those same conditions into the body. Higgins does not use the human figure to stabilise emotion or meaning. She subjects it to the same conditions of interruption, repetition and dispersal that organise the landscapes.
Kiss (Return) (2026) is the most explicit instance of this. Two figures lean toward each other in a close, almost cinematic frame. The image recalls the visual grammar of the film close-up, where emotional intensity is condensed into proximity, face and contact. Yet Higgins refuses to let the kiss arrive as a complete event. Across the surface drift yellow daisies and luminous particles, partially veiling the figures while binding them into the same unstable field of light. Desire is present, but not possessed. The image holds intimacy in suspension, rendering it as atmosphere rather than event.
Named after a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy, the work carries the sense of a moment recalled rather than secured. The kiss does not settle into the present; it appears as something already passing, held in the image as afterimage rather than event. Higgins’s treatment of intimacy is therefore indirect. It is mediated—by grain, by layering, by the interruptions of light—and by the temporal distance built into the work itself. In this, it departs from the immediacy associated with Nan Goldin, where intimacy is grounded in lived encounter. Here, it remains suspended, encountered at a remove.
Kiss (Return) #2 deepens rather than repeats the motif. The composition is closer, the emotional pressure tighter, yet the image remains no more stable. Yellow bursts and streaks of light traverse the faces, so that contact seems to occur through interference rather than despite it. The two works operate together less as a pair of variations than as returns in the strongest sense: the image comes back altered because it could not be fully grasped the first time. The logic is not narrative. It is recursive. The feeling intensifies through reappearance, not through progression.
This recursive structure has more in common with certain cinematic and literary traditions than with conventional portrait photography. One might think of Chris Marker’s use of repeated images, or indeed of Cavafy’s treatment of desire as something preserved in recollection rather than action. Higgins shares that sense that longing survives in fragments and resurfaces through them. She does not dramatise the kiss. She lets it hover.
Portrait (Morning Sea) (2026) is perhaps the most haunting of the figurative works because it extends that instability inward. A young woman’s face appears in profile, gaze lowered, the palette softening into warm browns and muted golds. Across the face drift yellow bursts and luminous streaks. Behind and within them, traces of seascape emerge: horizon, reflected light, water. The title is exact because it does not simply describe a background. The sea enters the portrait; landscape becomes inseparable from the figure’s image-state.
This is where Higgins’s practice most clearly exceeds simple categories of portraiture. The face does not function as an anchor of identity. It becomes a site in which body, atmosphere, place and memory overlap. In this, there are faint echoes of Bill Henson, especially in the refusal to grant the figure full descriptive stability. But Higgins’s method is fundamentally different. Henson’s figures are often held in darkness; Higgins’s are unsettled by accumulation—grain, flare, screenprint, the persistence of multiple image-times on one surface. The portrait does not emerge from shadow. It is crossed by weather.
What all three works share is a refusal of emotional closure. They allow longing to remain open, which is something more difficult than sentiment. The figures are present, but not fixed. Desire is visible, but not concluded. Higgins’s achievement here lies in recognising that intimacy can be held with greater force when it is not granted the authority of completion.
Abstraction and Disclosure
The exhibition’s two most reduced works, Hidden Things (2026) and Perfume (2026), are essential because they reveal the abstract engine beneath everything else.
Unlike the film-based works, these are made with acrylic ink and unique acrylic screenprint on paper. The shift in medium matters, but not because it marks a break from the rest of the exhibition. On the contrary, these works clarify what the others had been carrying all along. In Hidden Things, a violet field spreads across the surface while yellow bursts radiate from a loose central axis. There is no horizon, no face, no recognisable scene—only colour, pressure, dispersal. Yet the marks are immediately familiar. They are the same particles that drifted across Higgins’s skies and kisses, now freed from representational obligation.
The work therefore does not abandon the exhibition’s logic. It discloses it. What had appeared earlier as sparks, flowers, or afterimages now appears as pure event—light becoming gesture. The title is especially exact. Concealment is not a lack to be overcome, but a condition made visible. The image holds something back, and in doing so becomes more, not less, specific.
The image is neither denied nor delivered. It is held in suspension.
Perfume works through a softer but no less exact structure. A pink ground supports drifting crimson marks that blur, stain and disperse. The work’s title might seem vulnerable to overstatement, but Higgins earns it through formal precision. Scent is one of the few sensory experiences that behaves like these images: difficult to locate, inseparable from memory, persistent and fading at once. The crimson clusters do not depict fragrance; they move through the image the way scent moves through perception.
These two works place Higgins in a slightly different comparative field. If the film works connect her to post-photographic practices concerned with material instability, the abstractions bring her nearer to artists who treat the image as a site of particulate or dispersed structure. Daniel Boyd’s interruptive surfaces come to mind, as does Georges Didi-Huberman’s writing on the image as something that survives in fragments rather than appearing whole. Higgins’s abstraction is not autonomous. It is haunted by the photographic world from which it emerged.
Seen together, Hidden Things and Perfume sharpen what the entire exhibition has been doing. They show that Higgins’s real subject is not landscape, portraiture, or even analogue film in any narrow sense. It is recurrence: of marks, of chromatic pressure, of interruptions that move from sky to body to abstraction without ever settling into one meaning.
The Artist and the Form of Attention
This is what makes True Love at Dawn feel like a concentrated moment in Higgins’s practice. Over the past several years, across exhibitions in Melbourne, London, Berlin and New York, she has been building a language that treats the image as something formed through accumulation rather than capture, interruption rather than closure. Her background at both the Victorian College of the Arts and the Royal Academy Schools, and her movement between Melbourne and London, matter less as biography than as indications of how the work has arrived at its present form: expanded, cross-disciplinary, and unwilling to obey photography’s old certainties. The Bowness Photography Prize acknowledged the force of that trajectory; this exhibition gives it sharper internal coherence.
Higgins is not simply making images of atmosphere or longing. She is constructing the conditions under which they cannot be resolved.
What emerges across these works is a practice of attention. Higgins is not interested in imposing meaning upon the image from outside. She is interested in constructing the conditions under which meaning remains open—under which light, memory, atmosphere and desire continue to act within the picture without being resolved into statement.
That is why the exhibition lingers. Not because it is dreamy, and not because it offers analogue process as a soft form of nostalgia, but because it makes uncertainty exact. The image persists, but it does so under altered conditions. It can no longer be trusted as a stable surface of representation. It has to be encountered as something chemically, temporally and emotionally active.
What Higgins gives the viewer, finally, is not vagueness, but suspension—an image held at the point where it still appears, and has already begun to change.
The conversation that follows begins where the exhibition does: with light, film, and the instability of the image. Higgins speaks about process—found 16mm and 8mm footage, repetition, screenprinting, the pull of Athens and the Victorian landscape—but also about how an image can remain open without becoming indefinite. If the exhibition holds longing in suspension, the interview reveals the discipline that sustains it.
My work doesn’t necessarily unfold as projects—it emerges through material and experiment until something coherent begins to appear. — Anna Higgins
M-ARTLENS: During the development of the work, was there a particular experiment or discovery that began to shape the direction of the project?
ANNA HIGGINS: My work doesn’t necessarily unfold as projects, but emerges from working with material I have photographed and found, as well as experiments in the studio, until something emotionally or intuitively coherent begins to appear that can form a show. However, the themes of this show were solidified for me while I was curating the film program “In the Warm Room” at Mackintosh Lane last year, and a greater interest in sensuality emerging in my thinking.
When did Yukio Mishima’s short story True Love at Dawn enter your thinking while you were developing the work?
Quite late. I have been a fan of Yukio Mishima for a long time, and his intense and strange approach to beauty is something that I find deeply appealing and influential. I had already developed the show around dawn and dusk, and included the works featuring the kiss, when I encountered this story, and was struck by the many synchronicities with its themes and the complex ideas and interplays I was developing in the work.
What first led you to begin working with both your own photographs and fragments drawn from 16mm and 8mm motion-picture films?
I am very influenced by the history of experimental film, and its often radical approaches to collapsing found material and footage shot by the filmmaker. In terms of my particular approach, this has just developed over a long period of time. I see it quite similarly to a painter, where you have methods and strategies that you build up and layer back into the way you make work. An important thing for me is that the work has a sense of movement, as well as material reality, and I find motion picture film ideal for this.
When working with archival film material, what tends to draw your attention to a particular frame?
This is a highly intuitive element, but I often look for images that hold ambiguity, and are not locatable from a specific place and time.
I am interested in the idea of alchemy—when things align and become more than the sum of their parts.
Once you have selected an image—whether from film or from your own photographs—how does it begin to develop into the finished work?
Through a lot of experimentation with images, through multiple exposures and layering until something “works” – it’s highly process-based. I am interested in the idea of alchemy, when things align in a way that makes them more than the sum of their parts.
Your images are constructed through processes such as multiple exposure, layering and screen-printing. How do these stages shape the image as it evolves?
With such a multiplicity of images and possibilities available, I enjoy the way I work because a lot of it is “destructive editing” in the sense that because I am not primarily working digitally, I have to work with the material that I have, and accept it’s imperfections and accidents. I work with restricted process and image collections, which mean that experimentation is important at every stage of the process.
Many of the colours in the work emerge from the ageing of film stock. What interests you about working with colour that originates from the material itself?
I find the elements of how film ages, the grain, blurs and mistakes highly expressive and analogous to painting.
Much of the imagery centres on transitional light—dawn, dusk and sunset. What draws you to photographing these moments?
I find these moments in the day to be highly evocative. I became interested in this light when I was on a residency in Athens in 2021, and had the opportunity to observe the sunrise and sunset almost every day on Filopappou Hill, paying close attention to the atmospheric and tonal changes each day brought.
Landscape appears throughout the work, including photographs made in the Victorian alpine region and around Athens. How did these locations become part of the project?
I choose to use material from places I find personally significant and moving. I have frequently visited the alpine region of Victoria since I was a child, and have developed an ongoing obsession with the unique light of Greece, since I spent two months there in 2021.
One of the works in the exhibition, Kiss (Return), takes its title from a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy. When do literary references enter your process?
I find reading poetry and literature more helpful for developing emotional and intuitive complexity in the work than art theory or philosophy. I often find poets or writers who are already reflecting things I am feeling but cannot put into words. The condition of music similarly is something I also aspire to reach in my work.
The works are presented at a large scale. What led you to work at this size?
I am interested in the works being read between the gaps of painting, photography and cinematic space, therefore I find working at a large scale ideal in expressing this tension.
This feels like my most ambitious show—bringing together ideas I’ve been developing over several years.
Your practice moves between photography, film and printmaking. How did this way of working across mediums develop?
I have never studied photography, but studied painting, and then completed a post-graduate program that was not separated by individual disciplines but afforded me access to a print studio. I think this has given me the freedom to approach the medium/s from a place of amateur passion and fascination rather than an orthodoxy of how things should be done. I have always worked in a way that builds imagery up in layers and in the gaps, and its roots are a little mysterious to me, but are born out of process and experimentation.
Alongside your studio practice you co-direct Mackintosh Lane in London. How has that experience shaped the way you think about exhibiting work?
In terms of exhibiting work, it’s quite separate, but engaging with other artists who inspire me is a key part of how I find pleasure and meaning that sustains me in an artworld that can at times be difficult.
Where do you feel True Love at Dawn sits within the broader development of your practice?
I feel this may be my most ambitious show to date, bringing together many ideas, images and approaches I have been developing over the past several years.
Exhibition Details
Anna Higgins: True Love at Dawn
Neon Parc Art Gallery
15 Tinning Street, Brunswick, Melbourne
6 March – 11 April 2026
Gallery hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5pm, or by appointment
For more information visit: neonparc.com.au and annahiggins.xyz
