‘It’s going to be bonkers’: In this show, three artists explore their wild inner women

I haven’t had this much fun speaking with a group of artists in ages. One lives in Berlin and is a practising witch. Another lives in the so-called UFO capital of the world, Roswell, New Mexico, where she divides her time between art and cats. And the third has been rocking the boat since her final year of high school in Sydney, when she presented a self-portrait, naked, legs splayed, for assessment. How on earth did the teachers cope with that?

“Not very well,” says Del Kathryn Barton, who has grown from provocative art student to one of Australia’s most successful artists. “And it was not selected for ArtExpress , needless to say.”

She’s referring to the exhibition of best works by year 12 visual arts students from across NSW held each year at the state gallery. Barton has more than made up for that omission, winning the Archibald twice; she also has works in major public institutions across Australia, and has exhibited internationally.

From November 14, Barton will feature in the exhibition Maiden Mother Crone at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The show promises to push the boundaries of portraiture and acceptable female behaviour. In Barton’s words: “I think it’s going to be a really bonkers, exciting, kind of f----off show”. That’s a fairly good summation – Emily Hunt (the practising witch), Jess Johnson (who unreservedly answers to “crazy cat lady”), and Barton are all in some ways outliers, obsessive creators of fantastical worlds.

“We are all unapologetically maximal in our aesthetic,” Barton says.

Barton was the starting point for the exhibition, as the NPG owns her portrait of Maggie Beer, in which the famed Australian cook is depicted in the artist’s typically dream-like and heavily ornamented style, surrounded by a cornucopia of fruit, vegetables, flowers and a dazzling pheasant.

“And it is a much-loved work,” says curator Serena Bentley. “From there, we thought this might be an opportunity to bring new artists into the fold and introduce our audiences to artists they may not know so well, and so I was thinking about artists who shared this very distinct, excessively ornate sensibility.”

All three artists have created new works for the exhibition, which will also feature earlier paintings, textiles, drawings, ceramics and video.

Barton’s new works include an updated version of her scandalising Higher School Certificate offering. “Serena saw it during a Zoom [meeting] just hanging on the wall behind me, and she said, ‘That’s the one, that’s the show’,” Barton says.

Lurking in the background of Barton’s Sydney studio was a drawing in progress of a wild-haired young woman, legs wide open, a cascade of leaves gushing from her vagina. Barton has drawn female figures in this pose many times and sees it as a position of “profound vulnerability and profound power”. What it’s not, she insists, is a woman vying for male attention.

“It’s offensive to me if people just bring a sexualised gaze to it, or interpret it in a ‘male gaze lens’ kind of way,” she says.

The pose echoes a historical gesture known as “anasyrma”, ancient Greek for “skirts up”, a stance that has been associated with various intentions, including the warding-off of evil spirits, as a form of protest, or to repel enemy armies.

Barton has also made a new set of sculptures, or “stick warriors”, that she began working on about three years ago during a difficult perimenopause in which she found herself engulfed by an uncharacteristic rage.

“It was a very big energy and a very raw energy and a very emotional energy and I needed something in my practice to focus that through, and it needed to go beyond the well-developed methodologies in my painting and drawing practice. It needed to be material that I was unfamiliar with. It needed to feel really risky, desperate kind of play.”

Barton wasn’t necessarily making the sculptures for public display and admits to being anxious and excited by the prospect.

“They were tucked away, kind of out of sight, when Serena first came to the studio to talk about the show … and they caught her eye and she was like, ‘Wow, what is going on here?’”

The stick warriors are in part a talismanic response to the horrors of the 24/7 news cycle magnified by the online hate engine, which all too often directs its violence towards women. Barton has fashioned her army of “she-brush warriors” from used paintbrushes, driftwood collected on beach walks and acid-free twine, embellishing these humble materials with precious pearls donated by a pearl farmer.

“He gave me a full harvest of his pearl farm, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of pearls, and just said, ‘Do what you want to do with them’. And they sat there for a very long time because I was overwhelmed by the value of them and the beauty of them.”

These “she-brush warriors”, she says, “have walked through snowstorms, they’ve walked along ocean beds, they know where they’re going, but there’s no final destination. It’s like how do we bring our agency and our power, and our blind faith, that we can change the world with art?”

She punctuates the comment with a huge belly laugh, underscoring, perhaps, the mad idealism of her hopes. “I am a hardcore optimist,” she says.

Other works in the exhibition include Barton’s 2008 Archibald prize-winning self-portrait with her children, You Are What is Most Beautiful About Me and 2017’s sing blood wings sing, a monumental, five-panel painting celebrating a girl’s first period and emerging sexuality, originally inspired by the song Puff the Magic Dragon. Barton describes the five-panel work as “a profound celebration of the cycles of what it means to inhabit a female form”.

When I speak to Emily Hunt from her studio in Berlin, she credits Barton for giving her “permission to lean into being obsessive”. Hunt first set eyes on Barton’s work at an exhibition in Sydney in the early 2000s. Back then, at art school, it was “very uncool” to talk about magic, spiritualism and even surrealism. Hunt found Barton’s extravagantly patterned and esoteric works liberating. Even so, she reined in her spiritual inclinations for a time, and declared herself an atheist, to keep with the in-crowd.

“The art world does have its own pressures,” Hunt says. “So I thought, OK, I’m going to fit in. And then, in 2017, I moved permanently to Germany. No one’s around, no one’s judging me, no one’s going to even know what I’m up to.”

She returned to her love for the occult with a vengeance. As a former rare bookseller, Hunt was originally drawn to the occult through Renaissance print culture, specifically the work of artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien and their depictions of witches. She describes their witches, particularly Grien’s, as “extremely erotic and sexy, because they’re dangerous and deeply transgressive”. Inspired by these Renaissance forbears, Hunt revels in symbolism, opulence and embellishment.

She has created a new body of work for the NPG exhibition, including drawings on the theme of maiden, mother, and crone, drawings of protective female spirits, a ceramic sculpture inspired by Coogee’s famous McIver’s Ladies Baths – “you have to go, it’s all shapes and sizes, and it’s so beautiful not having men there,” she tells me – as well as a vase encrusted with Australian colloquialisms targeting women, such as “loose”, “battleaxe” and “tart”. Hunt has reclaimed these words as a source of power rather than insult.

“Being Australian and then living away from Australia, you start to love certain things about Australia, like this term ‘battleaxe’ … you do not mess with the battleaxe because she’s coming for you. She’s going to tell you off!” she says enthusiastically. “I love the battleaxe. She always gives you a good Bushell’s tea.”

Hunt’s Maiden, Mother and Crone drawings are intricately decorated collages of sorceress-like figures on traditional marbled paper that Hunt herself has made – choosing a background of marbled blue for the maiden, green for the mother, and the red of the Australian desert for the crone. Each of the drawings is encircled with names of women from Australian literature or popular culture that relate to the varying phases of a woman’s life – the Maiden drawing, for example, features, among others, the names “Debbie” and “Sue”, after the two teenage protagonists of Kathy Lette and Gabriel Carey’s rabble-rousing 1979 novel Puberty Blues.

“When I think about ‘the maiden’, I always think about Puberty Blues,” Hunt says. “Girls have got to get themselves into trouble … I’ve got myself into trouble many times. It’s really good for growing.”

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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