Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (1) - 2023

Lou Benesch’s 2023 exhibitions Untamed Splendor at Antler Gallery demonstrates the artist’s commitment to reimagining familiar subjects such as animals, plants, and food as symbolic carriers of narrative. Painted in luminous, jewel-toned watercolours, Benesch’s works operate between naturalistic study and allegorical fable. They are not simply depictions of deer, birds, or fruit, but visual devices that suggest myth, memory, and collective imagination.

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (2) - 2023

The use of watercolour is significant here. Historically aligned with fragility, domesticity, or amateur practice, watercolour has often been considered secondary to oil painting within Western art hierarchies. Benesch’s practice disrupts this narrative, pushing the medium into the realm of the monumental through scale, precision, and symbolism. In this way, the work resonates with Glenn Adamson’s assertion in Thinking Through Craft (2007) that so-called “lesser” materials and processes can destabilise established value systems in art.

This has direct relevance to my own MFA practice. Like Benesch, I draw on materials and visual languages that have been culturally coded as “decorative” or “feminine” and explore how they can carry narrative weight. Benesch’s approach reinforces my interest in the symbolic potential of ornament, and in the possibility of elevating whimsical or hyper-feminine motifs into vehicles for mythic or cultural storytelling.

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (3) - 2023

What I take from these exhibitions is not only Benesch’s use of imagery, but also her strategic engagement with material histories. By transforming watercolour into a medium of intensity and authority, she demonstrates how artists can reclaim undervalued processes as critical, contemporary strategies.

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (4) - 2023

Cristina Bacchilega - Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (1997)

One text that I’ve been reading is Cristina Bacchilega’s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. She talks about how retellings of fairy tales aren’t just playful updates but rather devices that actively challenge the old structures of power and gender hidden inside the originals. As she writes, “Fairy tales are never innocent; they are always already ideological.” That line really stuck with me, because it reframes fairytales as cultural tools, shaping how we think about gender, power, and morality.

I’ve always been drawn to fairytales and myth, but often through the imagery (enchanted forests, animals, magic). Bacchilega makes me consider how those images are carrying narratives with them, whether I intend it or not. She writes about authors like Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood, who twist traditional stories to expose the way women are positioned in them. That feels close to what I want to do visually: to use whimsical or hyper-feminine motifs as a way of reworking the “scripts” we inherit from culture. I’ve been exploring this idea by retelling current events through the visual language of fairytales and medieval imagery, and it feels pertinent - a timeless mode of storytelling, shaped through a feminist lens.

For me, the key takeaway is that retelling, whether in words or images, is political. To echo Bacchilega, “Postmodern fairy tales expose the fairy tale’s complicity in cultural processes of gender construction.” In my practice, I want to play with that complicity- leaning into the aesthetic pleasure of fairytales while also twisting them, unsettling their neat morals, and making space for new narratives.

Susan Sontag - An Argument About Beauty (2005)

This week I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s 2005 essay “An Argument About Beauty.” What struck me is how conflicted we are about beauty. On one hand, we crave it, surround ourselves with it, and let it shape what we find meaningful. On the other, beauty is often treated as shallow, suspect, or even dangerous. As Sontag puts it, “Beauty has never been democratic. It is always a privilege.” That reminder makes me think about how access to beauty: who gets to embody it, who gets to produce it, has always been tied up with power. It’s also got me thinking about pursuing passion being the realm of the privileged, and also how beauty in architecture and public spaces is typically the realm of the wealthy. These displays of power dynamics are perhaps the most obvious, but nonetheless illustrate the point of the essay well.

Sontag also writes that “beauty defines itself as the antithesis of the ugly,” which makes me think about how rigid those categories can be, and how art has the potential to blur or collapse them. This feels really relevant to my own practice. I’m drawn to things people might dismiss as “pretty” or “girly.” I’ve always felt that pull, but I’ve also felt the cultural baggage that comes with it, like beauty somehow makes the work less serious, and it’s been a hugely limiting belief in my time at RMIT so far. Reading Sontag makes me see that suspicion of beauty as part of a long history, not just my personal hang-up.

What I take from the essay is a reminder that beauty isn’t neutral, but neither is it frivolous. It shapes how we see the world and each other. In my practice, I want to embrace that double edge and to use beauty deliberately, knowing it can seduce and unsettle at the same time.

Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) - 1989

Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989

This week I’ve been looking at Barbara Kruger’s (Untitled) Your Body is a Battleground. It’s such a direct image: a woman’s face cut in half, positive and negative, with the text dropped on top like an advert. But instead of selling us something, it’s confronting us with the politics of the body. The message is blunt: our bodies aren’t neutral, they’re sites of power, conflict, and control.

What I like about Kruger is how she uses the visual language of graphic design: bold typography, red blocks and sharp contrasts to make her point unavoidable. It’s design as weapon and communication that refuses to be soft. In a way, it’s the opposite of my practice, where I lean into beads, sparkles, and fairytale imagery. But that’s why I find it exciting. It makes me think about how text and image can collide to amplify meaning, and how “feminine” aesthetics can be just as politically charged as Kruger’s clean, aggressive style.

Kruger’s work also feels timeless, the issues of reproductive rights and autonomy she highlighted in 1989 are still relevent now. That makes me reflect on how my own work could carry messages across time, embedding personal and political meaning into materials that might at first glance look whimsical.

Ella Walker - Various Works

Ella Walker (Untitled), TOAST Magazine, 2020

Looking at Ella Walker’s paintings feels like viewing a historical illuminated manuscript, yet her work feels distinctly contemporary in storytelling and themes. Her figures are flattened and everything seems to exist liminally between history and fantasy. I find myself drawn to the way she treats medieval visual language not as a tool locked in the past, but as a set of easily understandable symbols she can remix to tell new stories.

Marina Warner has written about how myths and folktales survive through constant retelling, and I think Walker is doing something similar with images. These works don’t seem to copy medieval forms out of nostalgia; rather they are stitched into contemporary narratives, and this creates a world that is both ancient and current. There’s something feminist about that too, a reclaiming of a visual history where women’s stories were often marginal.

Ella Walker - Cutting Flowers, 2022, Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk, and pencil on canvas, 210 x 100 x 20cm

For me, this resonates with how I approach fairytales, decoration, and narrative storytelling in my own practice. I’m not just borrowing “pretty” motifs, I’m interested in how those motifs carry cultural weight, suggest the cyclical nature of history, and how they can be recharged with new meaning by using contemporary aesthetics. History isn’t background material, it’s a collaborator. By pulling fragments from the past into the present, we get to re-script what they mean.

Ella Walker - Queen of the Night, 2022, Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk, and pencil on canvas, 210 x 120 x 20 cm

Kate Just - Various Works

Kate Just - Protest Signs (2022)

This week I’ve been looking at Kate Just’s knitted text works. What strikes me immediately is how direct the words are: short, sharp statements spelled out in bold typography, but then you realise they’re made through one of the slowest, most patient processes: knitting. That tension between speed of message and slowness of making is what makes them so powerful.

Kate Just - Self Care Action (2022-2023)

I like how this connects to communication design. Just’s pieces still read like posters or banners, direct, didactic, and impossible to miss, but they’re translated into a material with its own history. Knitting carries associations with care, domesticity, and the feminine, which gives her statements extra weight. It reminds me of what Rozsika Parker called the “subversive stitch”: the way textile practices dismissed as craft or women’s work can become political tools.

For my own practice, where I’m exploring beads, embroidery, and the hyper-feminine as strategies of expression, Just’s work feels like an anchor. She shows how material processes that are coded as “craft” or “feminine” can deliver uncompromisingly direct messages. There’s no apology in it.

Kate Just - Tickled Pink To Be A Woman (2023)

I also like that her work plays with contradiction: soft wool delivering hard truths, slow hands making urgent statements. It makes me think about how my own use of sparkles, fairytale references, and decorative detail can also act as typography in a way, a clear, visual language that communicates beyond just surface prettiness. As someone who has a background in communication design I’ve often shied away from incorporating typography or obvious hallmarks of comm design in my art practice, however this is showing me there is a world where the two can coexist.

Kate Just - I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest this Shit (2021)

Ebony G. Patterson - “...the wailing...guides us home...and there is a bellying on the land...” (2021)

Ebony G. Patterson’s “...the wailing...guides us home...and there is a bellying on the land...” (2021).Credit...Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

This week I’ve been looking at Ebony G. Patterson’s immersive garden installations. They’re bright, lush, and glittering: full of beads, sequins, flowers, and patterned fabrics, but there’s always something deeper happening beneath the beauty. Hidden in the layers are figures in grief, memorials, and references to violence and loss. The work pulls you in with its colour and texture, then slowly reveals heavier, more complex truths.

I’m drawn to how Patterson uses materials and techniques that are often labelled “decorative” or “feminine” (embroidery, beading, sparkles, ornament) and gives them scale and weight. In doing so, she challenges the old hierarchy where craft and beauty were seen as less serious than painting or sculpture. Her work sits within a broader conversation in contemporary art about reclaiming the ornamental as a valid and political form of expression.

In my own practice, I also work with beading, embroidery, and a palette of pinks and purples, often drawing on fairytales and myth. Like Patterson, I’m interested in how something whimsical or hyper-feminine can carry layered meanings about identity, power, and visibility.

Her work has me thinking about scale and atmosphere, and about creating spaces that viewers can step into, so they’re surrounded by the world I’ve built. It’s a reminder that beauty isn’t the opposite of criticality; the two can exist together, feeding off each other to tell a more complete story.

David Shrigley - Untitled (This Huge Cat) - 2022

Irreverent and playful, yet strangely poignant, Untitled (This Huge Cat) speaks to accepting the surprises of life with tenacity and resolve. Although the presence of type from the outset suggests a didactic interpretation, the oddity of the subject matter leads to a questioning of the absurdity of life, and allows for deeper thought and interpretation. Bold shapes and colours come into play here, and the concept is deceptively simple, almost child-like. The playfulness of the work creates an approachability that appeals in a time of social media memes and dwindling attention spans, conveying it’s immediacy and digestibility. The visible brush strokes and loose lines appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities, suggesting a carelessness that contrasts the astute perceptions contained within, but also speaking to the labor and human touch of the artist themselves. Shrigley’s work is determinately human - nothing, from his language to his painting style could be mistaken with the uncanny valley perfection of AI images.