There’s something eerily familiar about the helmet of Australia’s most notorious bushranger. It’s instantly recognisable upon viewing Dreaming of Sidney, a new painting by Australian artist Jamie Preisz, created as a part of his latest body of work, Soft Machine. Portrayed in Preisz’s signature style—a contemporary approach to modern portraiture and vanitas painting—the helmet is nestled in a bouquet of native flowers, its damaged shell grimacing in soft chrome.
Since 1879, the legend of the Ned Kelly’s helmet has spread far and wide from the Australian bush, its presence a lasting relic of the infamous Kelly gang. The Kelly gang constructed their suits of armour in preparation for the Glenrowan siege—where Kelly was to finally be captured—from using thick metal parts from a farmer’s plough. Looking at archival photographs of Kelly’s armour, bullets are memorialised by scattered indentations across the tarnished metal; surviving reminders of close-range battles with various enemies.
While Kelly was a feared outlaw, he’s remembered by many as a symbol of the Australian spirit—an enduring and misunderstood underdog who courageously challenged the authorities.
The ‘letterbox’-style of Kelly’s helmet has lived on in artistic reimagining’s over time. Most notably, Australian modernist painters Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker employed Kelly’s armour as an important visual device throughout their bodies of work. In the 1940s, Nolan and Tucker were both associated with the modernist art group the Angry Penguins, who sought to modernise Australian art and poetry through adopting a spontaneous and visionary approach to their work, influenced by surrealism. This anti-establishment approach to artmaking evolved through Nolan and Tucker’s depictions of the Australian landscape and the figures who appeared and merged within it. The work of these artist’s in particular was significant to constructing a modern vision of Australian history and identity.
Dreaming of Sidney is a contemporary coalescence of these enigmatic narratives. The inspiration behind the work arrived through a channel of divine intervention, Preisz explains, ‘Sidney Nolan, the painter, came to me in a dream and told me Ned Kelly’s helmet is just a vessel for ideas’. Kelly’s vessel then materialised on the artist’s canvas: an upturned bucket and decisive cut-out for viewing; reminiscent of the resourcefulness inherent to the Kelly gang. Although, there is a decisive softness about the helmet’s presence against a backdrop of navy blue. Preisz employs golden floral reflections as not only a nod to quintessential tropes of Australiana, but to the memory Kelly and his persistent character. The painting stands tall and strong, an unexpected and instantly iconic painterly memorial, one that encapsulates the spirit and legend of a man who once was.