COIL and ROAR

1.11.25 – 23.11.25
OPENING 3pm Saturday 1 November

A joint exhibition of new works by Paris-based Australian artist Clare Thackway and jeweller and sculptor Emily O’Brien, of Melbourne’s Studio Geld, speaks to the cultural legacies of gendered stories of shame, hysteria and transgression.

The exhibition’s title COIL and ROAR is drawn from the womb poems carved into ancient and medieval womb amulets. The charms bore images of dangerous, Medusa-like uteruses, emanating serpents from a woman’s face: “womb black, blackening, as the snake you coil and as a lion you roar” – mantras to smother, subdue and sedate female rage and rebellion. Derived from the time of Hippocrates and once considered a physical ailment, the concept of hysterical neurosis moved from neurology to psychiatry in the 19th century, and was deleted from the passages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as late as 1980. Magical and medical approaches to treating the women’s hysteria may have faded, but the cultural shadow looms.

Clare Thackway’s new works mine the archives of the Warburg Institute in London for images of Eve the moment before the Fall, reconfigured in fifty-two watercolour paintings like imprints from the past — shadowy, single-tone images projected onto our present. We see Eve in a repeated schema from iconography, passed through the centuries, reinscribed by Clare as a deposition in femininity: the unstable, cursed, wild woman, writhing, witchy, sensual and at the centre of a secret flesh world. These recurring images of Eve do not so much represent the idea of transgression, but images that are wholly and surprisingly transgressive in and of themselves – Eve in an animalistic nature place, Adam trimmed almost out of frame or whited out. Cropping and reinscribing images as disparate as medieval woodcuts and engravings to William Blake and the Sistine Chapel, Clare reveals a rich, strange trove of Christian art – which is not what we might imagine; history crackles with fevered politics through iconography.

Modeled from the line drawings from Victorian-era women’s sex guidebooks, elegantly masturbating hands recur as a cheeky motif in Emily O’Brien’s jewellery works in Coil and Roar. It’s said that Victorian-era physicians prescribed masturbation, then called an ‘hysterical paroxysm’, for hysteria. In this exhibition, the quietly subversive, disembodied hands now stud bracelets and strands of pearls, a feminine-coded, ecological gem recurring across Biblical and ancient storytelling. In Emily’s other works here, serpents – mythological, fearful – unwind across chains in a self-conscious meditation on the lasting power of old cultural stories of patriarchal shame.