“This exhibition brings together women artists whose work examines, critiques and explores ideas of estrangement. Through bodies, lands, and languages, their works reveal what is unfamiliar, repressed, or othered within colonial histories, patriarchy, and the self.
Working within a new gothic, their practice produces work that can be both alluring and unsettling, shifting between beauty and discomfort, the grotesque and the intimate. They draw on lived realities and dark themes, navigating conflict to uncover social and personal tensions.
Here, the gothic is not confined to shadowed spaces but brought into the open, revealing shared histories of women and people living in contested lands. Memory, suppression, dreams, and desire emerge in forms that are intimate yet uncanny, unsettling assumptions of belonging and reclaiming ground for what has been silenced.”
— Helen Curtis, Curator
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) build on Kain’s contemplative research of texts by monastic mystic, Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179). Kain moves between iterative research of Bingen’s texts, and excursions of photography: these reflections, and her photographs, are superimposed upon each other until they are densely matted and inextricable.
For Kain, the camera inexplicably becomes an optical summoning device of Hildegard, and the darkroom a place of workshop and transformation. The artist reflects on Hildegard both as an historical figure, and an extension of Kain herself, the way poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) described his heteronyms.
Kain’s works are directly influenced by Paul Carter’s Material Thinking (2004), which explores novel ways of creating collaborative works. Carter emphasises the generative capacity of ephemera and heterogeneity in creative development and art outcomes. He also highlights interdisciplinary workflows grounded in localization and specificity. Kain brings Carter’s theory to Hildegard’s texts through photography, by speculating the intense inner worlds of ephemera.
Artists include Kelsey Ashe, Jackie Cheng, Erin Coates, Eva Fernandez, Susan Flavell, Dianne Jones, Stirling Kain, Martina Mrongovius, Anna Nazzari, Nalda Searles, Lea Taylor, and Tineke Van der Eecken. Curated by Helen Curtis.
‘The Foreign Within’
Wallace at With (346 William Street, Boorloo/Perth)
Exhibition opening: 6pm-8pm, Fri 10 Oct
Artist talks: 11am-1pm, Sat 1 Nov (Kelsey Ashe, Stirling Kain, Martina Mrongovius, Nalda Searles, and Curator Helen Curtis)
Duration: Fri 10 Oct-Fri 5 Dec
“Stirling Kain approaches the Gothic from a unique angle. Working with historical photographic processes inspired by the twlefth-century mytsic HIldegard von Bingen, Kain uses the camera as a tool of invocation. Her tintype [prints] are talismanic-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.”
— Dr. Kelsey Ashe, ‘The New Gothic: Women Rewriting Darkness in the Antipodes’
Stirling Kain 