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Unmasking Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly: X-ray Fluorescence Conservation Imaging, Art Historical Interpretation and Virtual Reality Visualisation

Sidney Nolan’s 1945 painting Ned Kelly: ‘Nobody knows anything about my case except myself’ (hereafter Nobody knows) is one of the earliest instances of the artist’s use of the iconic black square motif to represent the mask of Australia’s most notorious bushranger. The work not only marks a defining point in Nolan’s development of the mask as a modernist pictorial device, but is significant in terms of his technical experimentation with paint. It also presents intriguing autobiographical elements that underpin his conception of Ned Kelly’s identity and contribute to the construction of his own self-image. A key artwork in the collection of the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Nobody knows thus holds unique insight into Nolan’s future evolution as an artist. The recent discovery, through X-ray fluorescence analysis at the Australian Synchrotron, of a fully-formed portrait head beneath the mask has opened up new avenues for the study of Nolan’s methods and materials and for fresh and thought-provoking interpretative possibilities. This paper describes the advanced conservation science imaging and reconstructive colouration methodologies that revealed the composition of the elemental underlayers of Nobody knows, and the application of these data to arthistorical interpretation. It also describes the design processes and strategies involved in creating a virtual reality museum installation that compiles, visualises and interprets these data for public audiences. In doing so it provides a case study for new museological and industrial workflows in which the acquisition of interrogative data about artworks and their materials, traditionally conceived of as collection documentation ephemera or as didactic tools, might deliver a new, natively digital aesthetic that not only aids in the interpretation of an original work of art but can also be leveraged by embodied media technologies to produce affective and user-driven cultural heritage experiences. In this workflow, data visualisation becomes an