Reimagining the decorative

Dr Natalya Hughes is a practice led researcher based at the Creative Arts Research Institute and Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University. Dr Hughes predominantly produces art exhibitions as research outputs by responding to and re-imagining the ways that decorative and ornamental traditions and human forms, particularly women, have featured in historical work.

“I'm a big fan of the idea that we often look past things. We're not super attuned to the ways that decoration or ornamentation might be communicating to us and be subverting our expectations,” said Dr Hughes.

For example, through painting, textiles, sculpture and installation, her work has investigated the relationship between Modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects. The modernist movement privileged masculine views over femininity and female agency. Dr Hughes’ work appropriates the compositions of Modernist artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner but also adopts a deliberately decorative language to explore, reconcile, and articulate differently the problematic representation of female subjects.

Dr Hughes’ research and feminist methodology have also been informed by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis relates to theories and treatment techniques that deal with the unconscious mind and releasing repressed feelings, memories, and desires. Like art, psychoanalysis has a complicated history in the way women have been both represented and supressed.

“I was approached by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, to create an exhibition based on my artistic practice and related to growing political and social interests in issues concerning women in the wake of the MeToo movement,” said Dr Hughes.

“I thought this would be a great way of bringing psychoanalysis into the conversation – to speak to its legacy and usefulness in the contemporary moment, while exploring issues related to the representation of women.”

The resulting exhibition, The Interior, is an immersive installation that reimagines Sigmund Freud’s consultation room, recreated through a collection of sculptural seating, antique objects and richly patterned soft furnishings that blur together private and public spaces.

Couches placed throughout the exhibition mimic the contours of the female body, with audiences invited to recline and reenact the roles of analyst and patient in a space that allows for rumination and reflection.

But look a little closer, and you’ll see the detailed decorative features on the furnishings contain potent visual symbols – motifs of eyes, rats, and snakes taken from the dreams and visions of Freud’s patient case studies. Much like the process of uncovering unconscious thoughts, memories, and feelings during psychoanalysis, these motifs peek through into the world for the audience to contemplate.

Working with other artists and fabricators, Dr Hughes further teases out the troubled relationship between Freud’s views on women and between psychoanalysis and feminism through the re-imagining of Freud’s personal collection of antiquities as having rounded stomachs and breasts.

“Freud’s consultation room has become this kind of visual icon, and I wanted to explore how I might speak to the legacy of psychoanalysis by playing with the iconic imagery of its interior. I looked to disperse this language across the installation as a more subversive communication of psychoanalysis and its history,” said Dr Hughes. “It also gave me the opportunity to, rather than work with historical images as the starter, pull images from the writings of Freud or about Freud.”

The Interior attracted an audience of over 2,100 at the Institute of Modern Art (July – October 2022) and is currently being toured by Museums & Galleries Queensland to 11 regional art galleries across Australia. The tour has so far seen over 11,800 people through the doors of galleries in Queensland and Victoria, with further galleries in New South Wales, Tasmania, and South Australia to host the exhibition across 2023-2026.

Using decorative and ornamental forms as a means to communicate and connect is appropriate for a wide range of ages and provides opportunities for immersive audience engagement as demonstrated by Dr Hughes’ installation The Castle of Tarragindi.

Commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s (QAGOMA) Children’s Art Centre (CAC), and produced in collaboration with the Gallery’s CAC, Exhibition Design, Graphic Design and Multimedia teams, The Castle of Tarragindi invited children to explore the imaginative art form of the ‘grotesque’ through hands-on and multimedia interactives.

Over 106,857 children visited QAGOMA’s galleries while the exhibition was open (September 2023 – July 2024). The Castle of Tarragindi was also adapted for the Gallery’s ‘Kids on Tour’ program that saw it tour to 202 venues from January to June 2024 including schools, regional galleries, and hospitals. The tour covered all 77 council areas in Queensland and the Torres Strait including 17 First Nations council areas. This has been the largest number of participating venues for any Kids on Tour program to date and the first time the program has been delivered to all council areas in Queensland.

“The program attracted participants who have not previously engaged with our activities. The fact that the activities were simple but engaging and appropriate for a range of ages and abilities helped to attract new audiences to our venue,” shared Warwick Art Gallery, Queensland, Australia.

While we commonly use the word ‘grotesque’ today to describe something that is ugly, distorted, or horrific, the word has its origins in the decorative. Historically, the term is used to describe images, objects, or visual traditions that combine something of aesthetic pleasure and something more challenging or unexpected, often comedic. In ornament or elsewhere, an example of the grotesque might combine curlicues, scrolls or florals with hybrid creatures: part animal, part object, part plant.

“The grotesque has been a key term in my research for a long time. When I asked my seven-year-old daughter, Violet, about what she might find interesting in an art exhibition, what she suggested around characters and hybrids, monsters and creatures, fantasy beasts and castles had connections with the grotesque,” said Dr Hughes. “Children are open to combining aesthetic with anti-aesthetic things, to difference and the unusual.”

The Castle of Tarragindi, based on the Castello di San Giorgio Canavese in Turin, Italy, and the decorative motifs of French designer Jean Bérain, has a striking blue and white palette with delicate forms conveying a fantasy space. In keeping with Dr Hughes’ creative work, when you look closer at the details depicted in the wallpaper designs you see that they depart from traditional decoration to display grotesque forms that incorporate local flora and fauna.

The grotesque’s hybrid nature allows for freedom of expression as there is no ideal or perfect form that children need to create – their creations can be meaningful or bizarre. One visitor noted in their feedback “There are no mistakes when creating. Something unique and incredible is always made.”

The range of exhibition activities were specifically developed to make the idea of grotesque design accessible to a broad audience, from toddlers to primary school aged children. Attendees could use magnets to form a large wall display of grotesque patterns or decorate a ‘Vibrant Vessel’ domestic ornament template then display it on the Castle’s fireplace mantel. In another area, interactive screens reflected distorted images of the viewer such as a larger nose or a multitude of eyes or swapped elements of two participants faces. One visitor commented about the experience, “the kids could all enjoy it regardless of their age”.

Several activities were intentionally designed to enable the children’s creations to be integrated into the castle installation, providing further inspiration to other children. For example, in the multimedia interactive ‘Castle Critters’, children could use a variety of elements to make their own hybrid creature, and when complete it appeared in framed screens on the walls of the space. These creations could also be shared via email or phone text message, with 46,231 being distributed while the exhibition was open.

Dr Hughes’ artistic practice invites audiences to look beyond to engage with the decorative and ornamental and reflect on the messages they are telling us. This mobilises the historically marginalised phenomenon of decor as an active space for viewer engagement. Across both The Interior and The Castle of Tarragindi, this allows audiences to contemplate and explore ideas of contradiction, difference, and representation in gentler but stimulating settings. This, in turn, facilitates open conversations about important topics, including the past representation and suppression of women and how we move forward.