Sean Burgess Paints Stanmore’s Past Back Into View

Every Sydney suburb has ghosts. Not the sheet-over-the-head Casper kind you’ll see everywhere this Halloween season. But the half-remembered characters, vanished businesses and strange little stories that slip quietly beneath new apartment blocks, renovated shopfronts and the brisk churn of Sydney life.

Sydney artist Sean Burgess goes looking for them.

His latest exhibition, Stanmore: The Past Next Door, is the newest instalment in People of a Time and Place, a roaming series that moves from suburb to suburb and allows each neighbourhood to supply the raw material for a new body of work.

“I like the idea that the show belongs to the suburb it’s in. The place gives you the material,” Burgess said.

For Stanmore, that material has been gathered from photographs, newspapers, maps, advertisements, court records and local archives. 

The resulting cast stretches from Eugenia Falleni to Noeline Brown’s connection to The Mavis Bramston Show, alongside wartime nurses, local characters, lost industries and the suburb’s long spiritual thread.

Arthur Stace’s famous Eternity also finds its way into the exhibition through The Eternity Man and conductor Richard Gill, who lived in Stanmore.

This is not history simply lifted from an archive and hung neatly on a wall, however. Burgess pulls it apart and puts it back together through paint, typography, cropping and layered composition, letting old material become something new, allowing the past to get messy again.

“The research tells me what happened. Once I start painting, I’m interested in what the image can become,” he said.

There is a quiet urgency running underneath the project, too. Sydney keeps changing, often at a speed that makes forgetting terribly easy.

“As Sydney gets developed and gentrified, I think it becomes more important to acknowledge what came before: the stories, the hardships and the people,” Burgess tells City Hub. 

“The whole idea of People of a Time and Place is to bring the local community together, celebrate the city’s past, learn a few stories and hopefully have people come in and share some of their own.”

Stanmore: The Past Next Door
The Corner Gallery, Stanmore
5–11 November, 11am–6pm daily
Meet the Artist and guided tour: 6 November, 6:30pm