National Portrait Gallery Opens Exhibition of Nearly 70 Works by Three Artists
The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has opened Mother Maiden Crone, almost 70 works by Del Kathryn Barton, Emily Hunt and Jess Johnson. The show, the first time the three artists have exhibited together, explores inherited roles of womanhood and runs until May 2027.
The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has opened Mother Maiden Crone, an exhibition celebrating unbridled messiness of womanhood, with almost 70 works on display until May 2027.
The show features three internationally celebrated contemporary artists: Del Kathryn Barton, Emily Hunt and Jess Johnson. It is the first time the three have shown their work together. Barton is a two-time Archibald Prize winner.
The gallery describes the exhibition as creating "a cacophony of disruptive female energy". It explores magic, witchcraft, ancient rituals and unbridled sexuality, and how the bright and beautiful sit alongside the dark and distasteful.
Three artists, one visual conversation
Barton's extravagant works were an early inspiration for Hunt, whose practice embraces magic and folklore. Johnson's colorful, geometric style shows a science fiction-inspired world.
Gallery director Bree Pickering said craft and the handmade underpin the show's conceptual and spiritual reckonings with age-old stereotypes. The works span drawing, painting, textiles, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture and video.
Each artist has a separate presentation, Pickering said, but they "sort of blend together in an exhibition that revels in the unbridled messiness of femaleness".
The crone as a force for change
For Hunt, the crone appears often because of her interest in "the question of magic". She said she is now in a position to "put my credibility on the line and say, 'Magic is real, and magic works'".
"Often old women are invisible in society, but there's an inherent kind of wisdom and power that is held in this position," Hunt said. She described the crone as a figure of redemption and a force that can create change.
Johnson has been drawing her science fiction world for more than a decade. Her works take archetypes from history and mythology, alongside modern ones, and re-imagine them in her own universe.
She described the surface as "the candy-coloured coating" that gives people access to deeper, more subversive ideas. "Power, and control, and systems of authority and how power is exerted on a population, those are running themes in my work," Johnson said.
Reworking inherited roles
Senior curator Serena Bentley said she was incredibly moved on seeing the completed exhibition for the first time. The curators used the tropes of the maiden, the mother and the crone to interrogate inherited roles of womanhood, she said.
"Maiden Mother Crone celebrates women who defy easy categorisation while revealing and dismantling the contradictions that shape both lived and imagined experiences of womanhood," Bentley said.
