‘It’s going to be bonkers’: In this show, three artists explore their wild inner women
Crones and battleaxes come out to play as three artists defy society’s rule book.
Like Barton, Hunt will be exhibiting works that she never intended for public display, created as sustenance during a difficult time. Hunt’s mother died this year, from cancer, and amid her grief, Hunt turned to art. “When you’re an artist, your work is there for you in your darkest moments,” Hunt says.
She began her Pandemonium series of watercolour drawings, which depict spirit figures dressed in fantastical costumes, and surrounded by occult symbols and lavishly decorated borders. These spirits were invoked to help her grieve. None of Hunt’s works represent portraiture in a traditional sense, but as she says: “Every artist, whatever work they make, it’s always a self-portrait of where they are in their life at that time.”
The figures that appear in Jess Johnson’s dystopian, intensely graphic and highly geometric works are for the most part androgynous, genderless, and hairless. She calls these avatars “flesh suits”, and so, when Bentley first approached her about an exhibition addressing the complexities of being a woman, Johnson had trouble at first knowing how to respond.
“I don’t like being told what to draw,” Johnson says, speaking from Roswell. “I’m not particularly interested in the representations of women … what I am interested in is a certain dark secret psyche, which I do feel leans towards something in the female psyche, and it’s about hidden knowledge and subversive applications of power.”
When she began discussing female archetypes with Bentley, ideas began to spark. Johnson admits to an almost “visceral repulsion to the fecund ‘earth mother’ archetype”.
“I don’t have children,” she says. “I never wanted children. The idea of womanhood being defined by the capacity to reproduce … I want to get really far away from that.”
She is however, energised by the archetype of the hag, and other potent figures including gorgons and furies, to which she adds her own futuristic visions, in drawings such as Red Gorgon, Maw and Post World Wretched Wurm.
“The hag, she’s an older woman, she’s childless, and she’s really f---ing powerful,” Johnson says. “Her power can come into being from the act of not reproducing … she’s tapping into this dark, ancient, secret knowledge as opposed to, you know, dredging power from this mother stereotype.”
Johnson’s vigorously strange drawings are significant at a time of rising misogyny, and, in the United States, an insistence on traditional female roles, with Vice President JD Vance singling out “childless cat ladies”.
“That’s just me to a ‘T’,” says Johnson. “I run a cat refuge in Roswell for semi-social to feral abandoned cats. There’s a lot of poverty and hardship in Roswell, and not many resources for people, let alone animals … so we’re pretty much the one-stop in town for people who can no longer look after their animals.”
Johnson and Hunt will be creating vast wall paintings for the exhibition – Hunt’s will tilt towards the occult, while Johnson’s is the image of a fierce, hybrid creature squatting to reveal a bizarre orifice, in an anasyrma-like pose.
“I didn’t actually know what the name of the gesture was, but over the years I’ve drawn my humanoid or alien figures or hybrids doing this pose,” Johnson says. She is pleased to be in an exhibition that doesn’t seek to place women in boxes – whether it be the conventional female roles dictated by the likes of Vance, or, at the other extreme, those who spout platitudes about “female empowerment”, which she finds equally stifling.
“It’s pushing the boundaries of acceptable femininity,” Johnson says. “I love how absolutely batshit women can be … that’s much more thrilling to me than idealistic portrayals of female strength. Why can’t we just be allowed to be our imperfect selves?”
Maiden Mother Crone is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, November 14 - May 23, 2027.
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