The love triangle that inspired some of our best-known artworks

The Heide Museum of Modern Art, established by arts patron Sunday Reed and husband John, is located in Victoria. But for actor Nikki Shiels, who plays Sunday Reed in Sunday, the Anthony Weigh play opening at the Sydney Opera House this week, it isn’t just a Victorian story. It’s an Australian one.

“We have national figures in this show,” Shiels says. “I think it’s important to celebrate them, not fight over them.”

As a 20-year-old art student, Nikki Shiels was blown away by her first visit to Heide Museum of Modern Art.Credit: Steven Siewert

Patron, philanthropist and so-called muse, Sunday Reed was at the centre in the 1940s and 50s of the Heide Circle, a close-knit and influential group of artists and bohemians that ushered in Australian modernism. They included Joy Hester, Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan. Shiels describes it as a “portal into a sensory, psychological inner life”.

Previously, she says, Sunday Reed “has been reduced in the National Gallery of Australia to ‘A gift from Sunday Reed’, the placard on the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series.”

But that plaque is not insignificant in the life and times of Sunday Reed; audiences coming to the play will discover it represents a larger, more complex and deeply engrossing story. Those famous Ned Kelly paintings appear as a plot point in the play (directed by Sarah Goodes for the Sydney Theatre Company), and so does Nolan, with whom Sunday had what Shiels describes as a “romantic entanglement”; the Reeds’ famously open relationship blurred lines between creative and personal passions.

In the past, Shiels said, those iconic artworks never really spoke to her, despite her understanding of how monumentally forward they were in terms of artistic practice. As a woman, she says, she’s drawn to female creations.

John and Sunday Reed in 1964. Credit: Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

But she’s starting to see them in a new light after all this time living in Sunday’s stylish clothes.

“I recently revisited the NGA and looked at that placard, and a portal opened up in my mind. I wasn’t at the paintings any more.”

She was thinking about the collaboration between Nolan and Reed, and about whether Reed was more artistically responsible for the paintings than she is given the credit, as well as being involved in the works’ creation simply by being Nolan’s patron, lover and mentor. When she looked at the paintings and the placard, she felt the story behind the brushstrokes.

“When you know that story, it’s bigger than the artwork itself. It’s time and history. Many creators make one artwork – it’s more collaborative than we think.”

Shiels is an expert in collaboration and has amassed an impressive body of work after training at Victorian College of the Arts.

She has just finished playing Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire) in Melbourne and recently brought stunning vitality to Sybylla Melvyn, the headstrong heroine of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career at Belvoir St Theatre. She was also an alternate performer taking on the astonishing feat of theatre that is STC’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Kip Williams – now heading to Broadway with Sarah Snook (Succession) starring.

Each of those roles showcase the complexities, realities and interiorities of women or defy gendered categories to explore the tension between what in our gendered, public selves is real and what is performative. Shiels says these are the stories and characters about which she is most passionate.

Reed has long been part of Shiels’ artistic journey. She still remembers her first visit to Heide Museum of Modern Art as a 20-year-old arts student. It blew her away.

“Our national galleries and state galleries are designed specifically to house art, whereas the Heide building were homes. They’re lived-in art galleries. They hold ghosts, I suppose, of the past.”

In this return season of Sunday, Shiels will walk back through time, touch the art we’re used to seeing hang so politely on gallery walls and bring it back to irrepressible, undeniable life.

Sunday, Sydney Opera House, until 7 December.

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