Working through ‘The Dark Side’

Sharyn Egan, Our Babies, 2019, 100 sardine tins, cloth, pebble gravel, dimensions variable; courtesy the artist

Tyrown Waigana, A Nice Place to Hate Yourself, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 61 x 4cm; courtesy the artist

Tarryn Gill, Pink Feline Trickster, 2018, EPE foam, LED lights with microcontroller, hand-sewn synthetic fabric, threads, 90 x 50 x 15cm; courtesy the artist and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney

The Dark Side, exhibition installation view, There Is, Perth, 2021; courtesy Ted Snell

The conflation of mental illness with artistic ingenuity, and suffering with compelling artwork, have permeated much of the complicated history connecting art and mental health. While awareness of the latter seems to have grown significantly over the last ten years, especially since the pandemic, it is an issue that can still be very challenging to understand and to talk about.

It was against this complex backdrop that ‘The Dark Side’, a recent Perth exhibition spread across Gallery25 at Edith Cowan University and There Is in Northbridge, offered a refreshing new lens to reflect on the connection between art and mental wellbeing. Curated by Ted Snell (Honorary Professor, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University), ‘The Dark Side’ brought together a multi-generational group of 14 Western Australian artists for whom artmaking can be a means to work through pain, difficulties and the shadows of the psyche.

The resulting artworks were as varied as each individual artist. Sharyn Egan’s Our Babies (2019), a series of around 100 doll beds fashioned from sardine cans, fabric and gravel, was created in response to the artist’s experiences as a member of the Stolen Generations. Installed in two orderly rows across both venues, the work used repetition alongside a minimalist aesthetic to powerful and solemn effect. Mary Moore’s etchings with mixed media from 1976 used a similarly restricted palette to explore the artist’s grief surrounding the loss of her sister. The works carried a diaristic tone with cryptic white marks on chalkboard-like black, giving them a sense of private interiority.

Mysterious symbols also surfaced in Tyrown Waigana’s expressive gestural paintings. With A Nice Place to Hate Yourself (2021), the artist employed vibrant magentas, yellows, oranges, blues and browns to create a surrealist scene of shifting perspectives and unease. At each venue, the works were positioned behind a mythic-looking creature shaped from polymer clay, a seeming guardian of the otherworldly spaces of Waigana’s paintings.

Mystical beings also abounded in Tarryn Gill’s seductive soft sculptures of beguiling cats and flying creatures, contortionists and grinning moons. These ‘Tricksters’ (2018), with their lush textures of fur, sequins and darting LED eyes, beckoned viewers into a world that appeared mischievous and playful yet potentially perilous and unsafe.

This allure of darkness – the pull between death and desire – appeared in a number of works, such as D’Arcy Coad’s ‘Morbid Curiosities’ (2020–21), a series of collages that juxtaposed fashion photography and film-noir stills with macabre imagery of post-mortem examinations and car crashes. In Roderick Sprigg’s painting Chicken (2019), two cars appeared frozen in time amid a head-on collision, recalling feelings such as shock, guilt and shame that can surface on reflection of difficult moments in the past. In her woven portraits of men whom she had jarring encounters with on Tinder, Carla Adams similarly spent time visually manifesting a source of pain or fear, seeming to wrest control to give it a life that she had agency in directing.

By contrast, Anna Nazzari’s tender watercolours grappled with the legacy of climate change and envisioned moments in the future. ‘The Harbingers’ (2020–21), a series of small drawings, depicted close-up details of bruised and diseased dolphin eyes, while Immersive (2020) showed a man all but swallowed up by the sea. In their delicately rendered details, the profound sadness and plausibility of Nazzari’s drawings felt all the more harrowing.

By placing emphasis on the artist’s process, ‘The Dark Side’ encouraged deeper reflection on the relationship between the artist and their artwork and, in turn, a more empathetic reading. The exhibition could have easily veered into voyeuristic territory or down the well-trodden path that pairs suffering and creativity. While at times ‘The Dark Side’ walked a tightrope through this terrain, it explored the topic with respect, nuance and commendable complexity.

Megan Hyde, Perth

‘The Dark Side’ was shown at Gallery25, Edith Cowan University, and at There Is, Perth, from 27 May until 17 June.