Australian artist Natalya Hughes brings together decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body, and excess.

Can we use the talking cure to solve society’s ‘problem’ with women?

Our touring exhibition Natalya Hughes: The Interior opened at Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum last Friday 4 July.

Thank you to everyone who came out to attend the opening weekend and associated public programs.

The Interior invites audiences into an exaggerated consultation room, playfully furnished for psychoanalysis.

The immersive installation—combining sculptural seating, richly patterned soft furnishings, and uncanny objets d’art, nestled around a hand-painted mural—generates a stimulating space to unpack our collective and unconscious biases.

Audiences are invited to recline and be enveloped, soothed, and held by the furniture’s womanly forms while taking turns playing analyst and patient. Throughout this bodily encounter, ‘The Interior’ hopes to create a space where the existence of women can be reimagined on different terms in the post-‘Me Too’ world.

Currently in it’s eighth stop on a national tour that began in 2022, ‘The Interior’ is on show at Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum until 23 August.

‘The Interior’ is a travelling exhibition organised by the Institute of Modern Art and toured in partnership with Museums & Galleries Queensland. The tour has been assisted by the Australian Government though the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, the Australia Council’s Contemporary Touring initiative, the Fini Artist Fellowship through the Sheila Foundation, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and Porter’s Paints, New Farm.