Though we only met for 30 minutes a decade ago, Greer Honeywill has been omnipresent in my life ever since. 

The Melbourne-based conceptual artist, aged 80, has spent four decades exploring the importance of home as a place to create memories.

For Honeywill, home is a frame to view the endless possibilities the world has to offer.

Home has often been a complicated notion for me, growing up as a South Korean adoptee in regional Tasmania, struggling to understand my identity.

Immersing myself in Honeywill’s art felt like discovering another puzzle piece, aiding that understanding. Connecting with her most recent project, I realised how profound our fleeting meeting 10 years ago was.

A lone fox and a chance encounter

In 2015, while working for a newspaper, I was assigned the task of photographing Greer at her upcoming exhibition, The Ever Present Eye, in Hobart.

I told Greer I was captivated by her photo of a lone fox gazing across the River Derwent at night-time.

It was true but, in telling Greer, I was also trying to make her feel more comfortable while I took her photo. She told me that her father, a portrait painter, often captured her face on canvas and later in photos, but that “it never looked like me”.

She later told me, “I just wanted an honest photograph, not a flattering photograph, that I felt looked like me.”

“And Goddamn it, that’s what you took. You took a picture of a person that made that person feel it was them.”

Her gratitude for the photo manifested in the most unexpected way. 

The Monday after the newspaper article I’d been assigned to work on was published, I received a phone call from Greer, generously gifting an artist proof of the lone fox photo that had caught my eye.

I framed it and it has always been displayed prominently in the different homes I’ve lived in ever since. When guests visit for the first time, they always have something to say about the fox in such a familiar Tasmanian landscape, and the provenance of the work and artist is always a topic of conversation. 

And so, in the intervening decade, I’ve always felt Greer’s presence.

Architecture and Bauhaus modernism

Honeywill and her husband, Ross, arrived in Tasmania in 2010 from Melbourne amid the polarising Fox Eradication Program. That, in her words, “the cunning fox, in a period of two centuries, has not established itself in Tasmania as it did on the mainland”, was a curiosity that she wanted to explore.

And that’s exactly what she did in her 2015 series of photographs, The Ever Present Eye.

“The fox, true to its history, had polarised the population of Tasmania. More than the possible presence of the predator itself, the spending of a reported $40-50 million of public money on an eradication program without a proven fox kill seemed a bitter pill for many — a scenario worthy of Shakespeare’s hand,” she says.

Honeywill’s earlier work explored architecture as art, particularly modernist architecture, like Bauhaus, and society’s relationship to home.

House design had interested Honeywill from a young age; she says her three-bedroom, red-brick family home in Adelaide “seemed to suck all the air from my lungs”.

“I was always trying to escape [it] because it offered me no place to exist.”

Greer hated that the house had no prospect, just a view out to a suburban street.

At nearby Henley Beach, west-facing houses on the esplanade, that looked out onto the sea, fascinated her. She recalls telling her parents at five years of age, “I love those houses.”

Decades of artistic practice exploring the intersection of art, architecture and life would follow.

Architectural style crosses seas

In December 2024, the curator of an exhibition at Devonport Regional Gallery in Tasmania, Lost in Palm Springs, invited me to the opening.

That curator was Honeywill. It had been nearly 10 years since we’d spoken.

I was struck by her warmth, the same I had encountered years earlier.

“I can’t tell you how much I want you to be there, looking at the exhibition and talking to me,” she texted.

The exhibition is about the connection between the Californian city Palm Springs and Australia, and the modernist design in homes and landscapes in both places. Bauhaus style — with its geometric features, and few flourishes — plays a big part in the exhibition.

“People had forever been saying, ‘If you’re interested in affordable contemporary housing architect design, then you must go to Palm Springs,’” Honeywill says.

The city has a concentration of mid-century homes, including those designed by influential architects Donald Wexler, Richard Harrison and William Krisel, to name a few.

When Honeywill visited, it left an indelible impression.

“I was overcome with everything, the number of houses, incredible mountains, blue skies, palm trees, everything. The subject matter of two doctorates and more than four decades of visual art practice all came together when I focused on Palm Springs. So, of course, at that moment, I had to work out how I could make this the next project.”

A battle to overcome cancer, three residencies in Palm Springs and an immense amount of work later, Honeywill’s Lost in Palm Springs project was realised in 2023, in the form of a book and a three-year touring exhibition throughout regional Australia, that kicked off at Queensland’s Home of the Arts (HOTA).

It features 14 artists, architects and thinkers from the United States and Australia, including artists Tom Blachford, Kate Ballis and Rosi Griffin.

The inclusion of Australian artist Robyn Sweaney’s work highlights the importance of documenting these iconic houses, particularly given their susceptibility to disappearing; many of these iconic homes are being lost to new housing development.

“The exhibition launched in Queensland and up on the Sunshine Coast there are a lot of mid-century modern houses and they’re disappearing very quickly,” Honeywill says.

“There’s a painting [by Sweaney of] a house she photographed and documented very carefully because she wanted to paint it, and when she came back to do it after a period, she found it had gone.”

‘Alive is total immersion’

Devonport, the coastal town on Tasmania’s north-west coast is the seventh of 11 regional galleries hosting Lost in Palm Springs.

It’s here, 10 years later, that Honeywill and I are in the same space again.

She tells me she’s worn the same gold gilet, that she designed herself, that she was wearing when we met in 2015.

“I’m an archivist, so I’m going to keep things for as long as I can because they’re full of memories,” she tells me.

I’m impressed by the exhibition. Being 80 has not slowed down Honeywill’s art.

“I want to be alive and alive is total immersion and total immersion is working hard,” she says.

I tell Honeywill how I often recount the story of how we first met and the beauty of having a fleeting interaction with someone, and then intersecting again, as we are now.

“This is not fleeting Luke,” she replies. “It never went away for me. I thought you were a very special person … I was always sad that I met you at the end of our time in Tasmania and not the beginning.”

I recall a quote from T.S. Eliot that Honeywill used in the closing chapter of the Lost in Palm Springs book.

“What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning.”

Lost in Palm Springs is at Devonport Regional Gallery until March 22 and will tour to four more regional galleries in NSW and QLD until July 2026.