The New Gothic: Women Rewriting Darkness in the Antipodes. 'The Foreign Within' Catalogue Essay

NAZARRI Anna, The Awakening, 2022-2025. Alumalux Print 60 x 91cm

Exhibition Essay for:

The Foreign Within

WALLACE GALLERY, PERTH WA

Curator Helen Curtis

By Dr. Kelsey Ashe

In Western Australia, a growing group of female artists are forging a distinctly Antipodean Gothic — a critical, decolonial, and phenomenological mode of practice in which women’s voices reclaim darkness as a site of knowledge, reanimate suppressed histories, and transform haunted terrains into potent languages of resistance and renewal. The Gothic is no longer confined to ornamental abbeys or the flickering shadows of the Romantic imagination. Here, in the southern hemisphere, the genre allows a vigorous mode of inquiry — a way of thinking through colonial violence, ecological fragility, cultural erasure, and troubled memory.

Traditionally, the Gothic has been a literature of shadows — preoccupied with ruin, repression, fear, and melancholy. Yet in the hands of these artists, the act of “facing the dark” becomes a methodology: a means to excavate what settler histories have buried, to speak what was silenced and shine light on what was censored.  Across these works, what lies underneath official narratives emerges again to confront and transform our understanding of the present.  And here, in The Foreign Within, that voice is resolutely all-female — strong, empowered, and unafraid to inhabit the depths.

For First Nations artists, this reclamation is especially urgent. Dianne Jones’ photographic interventions repossess the colonial archive and reverse its gaze. By queering and unsettling its imagery, she transforms the “dark other” — so often constructed as the spectre haunting white history — into the figure who now haunts the oppressor. The dispossessed rise, not as passive ghosts but as powerful presences. Through this inversion, the Gothic becomes a tool of resistance and a way to reconnect severed stories, allowing ancestral voices to speak again.

Bibbulmun artist Lea Taylor treats the genre as a deeply embodied act of cultural continuity, drawn from ancestral knowledge. Grounded in traditional systems, her fibre works are both record and vessel, carrying narratives through land and community while enabling their ongoing transmission. In After the Cull (2025), Taylor responds to the mass culling of kangaroos under colonial agricultural policy, reframing the animal not as pest but as kin — a brother or sister within the totemic order. Through this work, she uses relational ethics to ask how we might reimagine ecological stewardship by listening to the voices of Country, both animal and human.

L to R: (Details) JONES Dianne, A Haunting Series, Man with Cane, (2009), TAYLOR Lea, After The Cull, (2025), SEARLES Nalda, Figure Vagalis, (2010-2025),

Nalda Searles, a pivotal figure in Australian fibre sculpture, has spent decades gathering and reworking the vegetal debris of the bush, weaving salvaged fibres, found objects, and personal remnants into potent statements of memory and identity. In Figure Vagalis (2010–2025), a vessel formed from her own tangled hair cradles a carved female figure, its unapologetic sensuality confronting colonial taboos around sexuality, embodiment, and the female form. Searles’ practice is both archaeological and intimate: it excavates histories embedded in the landscape while reclaiming the body as a site of agency and knowing. Her work reminds us that memory resides not only in archives and texts, but also in the detritus of life — fibres, fragments, and traces of corporeal presence.

In Eva Fernández’s provocative series Unos cuantos piquetitos (a few small nips), she meticulously stitches over the absences of the dominant historical record, literally and metaphorically embroidering omissions onto archival images. Her work confronts intergenerational trauma, examining how diasporic displacement can persist not as distant events but as embodied wounds inscribed into the present. Through this tactile intervention, Fernández transforms the photographic image from a static record into a living site of memory where the personal and political converge. She provokes a Gothic atmosphere of unease by articulating the unspeakable, written in piercingly visceral red threads.

The landscape itself, vast and ancient, is a central character in the Antipodean Gothic. Anna Nazzari’s The Awakening situates memory within the terrain of the West-Australian interior, where familiarity and estrangement collapse beneath a bleaching sun. The land is not merely a backdrop but an active force, strange, hostile yet alluring.  Freud’s concept of the unheimlich — the “unhomely,” where the familiar becomes peculiar and the peculiar becomes intimate — finds potent expression here (Freud, 1919). Exile and belonging recur as motifs, evoking a lingering sense of dislocation that resonates with Australia’s colonial past and unsettled multicultural present.

Other artists probe the relationship between body, landscape, and memory through material experimentation. Jacky Cheng’s Time and Place – Rituals, created during a residency in Finland, is a contemplative record of presence. Each drawn line, stitched thread, and fragment of fibre maps the negotiations between gesture and environment.  This daily ritual transforms paper into a vessel for breath, silence, and shifting light. Cheng’s work appears as a careful inscription of her bi-cultural identity, where subtle accretions of time and the layered depth of lived experience are imprinted.

L to R: FERNANDEZ Eva, Unos Quantos Piquetitos, (2016), NAZARRI Anna, The Awakening, (2022-2025), CHENG Jacky, Time and Place, Rituals, (2017).

Susan Flavell’s My Mother’s Burial, a hand-sewn flag using inherited fabrics and eco-dyed materials, questions nationalism, mortality, and humanity’s impact on the planet. By appropriating the language of flags and rendering them intimate and fragile, Flavell teases out new meanings.  Her work confronts viewers with the personal dimensions of political grief and the ecological dimensions of familial loss — a quintessentially Gothic merging of the domestic and monumental.

This embrace of hybridity — of species, identities, temporalities, and materials — recurs across the exhibition. Erin Coates’ sculptures splice vertebrae into oyster shells, imagining monstrous futures shaped by human intervention and environmental collapse. These biomorphic assemblages speak to a posthuman Gothic, one that interrogates the porous boundaries between human and non-human, natural and artificial. The monstrous, so central to the genre’s tradition, is reclaimed here not as aberration but as possibility — a metaphor for transformation and a challenge to rigid binaries (Haraway, 2016). Coates asks us to consider what new forms of being might emerge from the wreckage of the Anthropocene.

Stirling Kain approaches the Gothic from a unique angle. Working with historical photographic processes inspired by the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, Kain uses the camera as a tool of invocation. Her tintypes are talisman-like; material traces of encounters between artist and subject, where the darkroom has become a space to summon the unseen and the ineffable. Kain’s practice suggests that the “foreign within” is an inner landscape — a space where communion with the past becomes possible.

L to R: (Detail) FLAVELL Susan, My Mother’s Burial, (2025), COATES Erin, Lateral Evolution #1, 2, 3, (2025) , KAIN Stirling, Just as the arm is joined to the hand and the hand to the fingers, so also there is no doubt that understanding proceeds from the soul (I)and (II), (2025).

In my own work, a large-scale screenprint titled Snakes and Ladders (Turned to Stone), I envision a broken medieval Magdalene statue submerged in the sea — a metaphor for the suppressed sacred feminine, suspended in a state of latency and potential. Lying forgotten on the ocean floor, enveloped by seaweed and coral, her compassion is muted by the weight of history, yet she endures with quiet persistence. In this submerged state, beauty and decay entwine and despite seeming erasure, her divine power persists.  She remains ready to surface and speak anew to a world that has sought to silence her nurturing wisdom.

Flemish-born, Walyalup-based artist and poet Tineke van der Eecken’s intricate copper works are drawn from natural forms, biological processes, and layered cultural memory of language. Her work Paperbark Language (2025) operates through tracing the suppressed histories of her lineage — the prohibition of Flemish in her grandmother’s school and the inherited wounds of occupation —and translating them into copper, silk, and thread. These works speak to the politics of voice: to what is silenced, denied, or severed from land and identity.

Martina Mrongovius extends this exploration of perception into holography. In Figure 8 on Drummond Street, she stitches together the perspectives of 26 photographers into a spatially animated hologram that literally shifts as the viewer moves. This dynamic multiplicity — this constant slipping between perspectives — embodies the Gothic’s concern with instability and perception. Mrongovius’ work questions how collective perception shapes reality. In an age when seeing through each other’s eyes can be both empathy and control, the piece feels prophetic — a meditation on how we construct, distort, and inhabit shared worlds.

L to R: (Detail) ASHE Kelsey, Snakes and Ladders (Turned to Stone), (2024), VAN DER EECKEN Tineke Paper Bark Language, (2025), MRONGOVIUS Martina, Figure8 Drummond Street, (2024).

Across these practices, the New Gothic in Western Australia emerges as profoundly political, relational, and transformative. It is wielded by women as a decolonial and feminist strategy — a way to dismantle patriarchal and colonial myths that still shape Australian culture. As a trope, it faces harrowing truths while insisting on the persistence of memory beneath layers of erasure. It refuses to forget, to be silenced, or to sanitise. It is not nostalgic for the past but engaged in re-storying it — weaving new narratives from fragments once peripheral or deliberately hidden. It is also a language of care and compassion — the soft needle of women’s power is an effective one — re-stitching the severed connections between land and people. This is where the healing can begin.

What is emerging is distinctly Antipodean, an Australian Gothic — not rooted in crumbling European ruins but in red earth and saltwater, in tangled hair, burnt grass and eucalypt. It is attuned to vast skies and ancient ground, to the uneasy “terrible” beauty and harshness of the environment.  To gather these practices of all-female authorship into a single exhibition is itself a courageous and visionary act. Curator Helen Curtis has created a space where difficult conversations can unfold — where grief, rage, tenderness, and hope coexist, and where the “foreign within” can respectfully be examined.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashe, Kelsey. 2018. “Dark Swan: Contemporary Tales of the Gothic Antipodes: From the Curator.” In Dark Swan: Contemporary Tales of the Gothic Antipodes, exhibition catalogue, 1-18. Fremantle: PS Art Space.

Gregg, S. 2011, ‘The New Romantics, Darkness and Light in Australian Art, Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd: Melbourne.

Freud, Sigmund. 1919. “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, edited and translated by James Strachey, 217–256. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge.