Natalya Hughes - The Interior

An Institute of Modern Art (IMA) travelling exhibition toured by Museums & Galleries, Queensland

25 November 2023 – 18 February 2024

The Interior is an immersive installation combining sculptural seating, richly patterned soft furnishings, and uncanny objet’de art, nestled around a hand painted mural to generate a stimulating space to unpack our collective and unconscious biases.

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.

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

_{The Interior has been assisted by the Australian Government though the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; the Australia Council’s Contemporary Touring initiative; the Fini Artist Fellowship through the Sheila Foundation; Queensland College of Art, Griffith University; Creative Art Research Institute, Griffith University; and Porter’s Paints, New Farm.}

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