COIL and ROAR: exhibition by Clare Thackway and Emily O’Brien

Overview

COIL and ROAR speaks to the cultural legacies of gendered stories of shame, hysteria and transgression.

Paris-based artist Clare Thackway, a finalist in this year's Archibald prize, and Melbourne sculptor Emily O'Brien are alumni of the Australian National University School of Art.

The exhibition's title COIL and ROAR is drawn from poems carved into Byzantine amulets: "womb black, blackening, as the snake you coil and as a lion you roar". Magical and medical approaches to treating the women's hysteria may have faded, but the cultural shadow looms.

Clare Thackway presents works on canvas plus watercolour paintings of Eve the moment before the Fall, derived from her residency in the archives of the London's Warburg Institute. In these works, we see Eve in a repeated schema from iconography, passed through the centuries, reinscribed as a deposition in femininity, the unstable, cursed, wild woman, writhing, witchy, sensual and at the centre of a secret flesh world.

Emily O'Brien's quietly subversive jewellery works are modelled on drawings from Victorian-era women's sex guidebooks that contain intimate treatments prescribed to relieve an 'hysterical paroxysm'. In this exhibition, disembodied hands stud bracelets and strands of pearls, the feminine-coded, ecological gem that recurs across Biblical and ancient storytelling.