The Interior

Natalya Hughes

Can we use the talking cure to solve society’s ‘problem’ with women? Natalya Hughes’s The Interior invites audiences into an exaggerated consultation room playfully furnished for psychoanalysis.

Interested in the role of women and their historical absence from positions of power, the part-professional, part-domestic setting conjured by The Interior plays with gendered power dynamics between public and private space. The couches that dot the gallery take their lush contours from the shapes of the female body, and their detailed upholstery sees motifs of eyes, rats, and snakes from Freud’s patient case studies ripple over the space in fleshy tones.

The decorative elements play an important role in signifying knowledge and professionalism, while also embracing a domesticity to encourage trust from the patient to explore their unconscious desires and impulses.

Audiences are invited to recline and be enveloped, soothed, and held by the furniture’s womanly forms while taking turns playing analyst and patient. Throughout this bodily encounter, The Interior hopes to create a space where the existence of women can be reimagined on different terms in the post-‘ Me Too’ world.

The Interior is on exhibition in Lewers House from 17 August  – 27 October 2024

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Natalya Hughes, one of Australia’s most exciting mid-career artists, is known for her explorations of decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the human form, and excess. Recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between Modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects.

In November 2021, Natalya was announced as the recipient of the Michela & Adrian Fini Artist Fellowship, awarded by the Sheila Foundation, helping the artist to realise The Interior, her most ambitious project yet. The Fellowship supports the development of new work by contemporary women practitioners at a critical juncture of their career and assists in the presentation and documentation of the work at contemporary art spaces within the national Contemporary Art Organisations Australia (CAOA) network. The Fellowship was established through the generosity of Sheila Foundation board member Michela Fini and her husband Adrian, and is awarded annually over three years, to provide vital support to women artists and contemporary arts institutions around Australia.

The Interior is a travelling exhibition organised by Institute of Modern Art (IMA), toured by Museums & Galleries Queensland.

The Interior has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; the Australia Council’s ContemporaryTouring Initiative; The Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Fini Artist Fellowship through the Sheila Foundation; Queensland College of Art, Paints, New Farm.

Museums & Galleries Queensland is supported by the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation and receives funds from Creative Partnerships Australia through the Australian Cultural Fund.

Natalya Hughes is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane, and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.