Contemporary Australia: Women

145 Monika Tichacek Switzerland/Australia b.1975 Transmission 2011 Pencil and watercolour on paper 150 x 125cm I had a strong taste of earth and water in my mouth, the taste of forest, of dead leaves. There were lots of roots, too, smelling nicely of liquorice, witch hazel, gentian, and they slipped down my throat like a sweet dessert, festooning me with long strands of sugary drool. Belching gently, I stuck out my tongue and licked my chops. Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust andTransformation 1 In Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Pig Tales , a nameless woman working in a beauty parlour begins a slow sensorial transmogrification into a sow. The account is deeply disturbing in its exploitation of hackneyed ideas about women and nature, bestiality and sexuality. Acclaimed as liberating for its brutal honesty and eccentricities, it was equally loathed for its perceived perpetuation of stereotypes. By making nature her subject matter, accompanied by a somewhat unfashionable yearning for spirituality, Monika Tichacek’s drawings could also be read with some ambivalence, particularly in the context of an exhibition focusing on work produced by female artists. However, Tichacek has walked this fine line before. Throughout her decade-long video and performance practice, this Swiss-born artist has created a succession of uncomfortable, provocative female portraits — largely enacted in nondescript, sterile settings — from Botoxed, breast-implanted, cat-eyed, transgender seductresses to victimised, screaming women, their eyes masked and legs sewn together with surgical thread. The last time Tichacek partnered with nature — in the video The shadowers 2006 — a hypodermic needle was driven through her tongue and into a tree stump; her forced symbiosis with the tree was heightened by the pinning of her long nails. A harrowing, surreal, sadomasochistic tale, it featured three women (including Tichacek) playing out cruel power plays and acts of debauchery in claustrophobic dark spaces and a forest wilderness. In her most recent work, the absence of her own body, and other women’s bodies, is intriguing. 2 Would these beautiful, intricate and lyrical drawings seethe with veiled violence if we had no knowledge of Tichacek’s oeuvre? The drawing series entitled ‘To all my relations’ 2011 bursts with life, offering a vivisection of a fertile natural landscape. Insects swarm flowers overflowing with nectar, luscious plants bud and thrust. Vivid colour — rich greens contrast with warm yellows and blood‑coloured flowers — suggests abundance, fertility and unfettered sexuality. Like Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales , Tichacek claims she is less interested in ideas around feminism; her focus is now our interconnectedness with the ecosystem. This departure is not about how Tichacek might traverse the thorny terrain of women’s continued metaphoric association with nature. Rather, she speaks of the work as deeply personal and intimate, not solely due to technique, which necessitates her working alone using her body to gesture across large sheets of paper, but also because the work is instinctual. Tichacek is exploring a more spontaneous sense of being: ‘I needed light after so much darkness’. 3 The works represent more than a redemptive exercise or a dabbling in an idyllic idea of beauty. Tichacek continues to explore themes of life cycles and life’s existential questions. Such reflection was triggered by a two-and-a-half‑year trip to the Amazon and the United States, where, guided by shamans and Native American peoples, Tichacek’s relationship with the natural environment deepened. One of her most intense experiences was the ceremony incorporating the visual and auditory stimulant ayahuasca, or the ‘vine of the soul’. Traditionally used in the Americas for divination and healing, this sacred plant allows imbibers to engage with an ancestral world in which tree and plant spirits reveal themselves to cure human ailments. 4 Tichacek describes ingesting ayahuasca as a traumatic physical and emotional experience: ‘the sense of who and what I thought I am, was being shattered and disintegrated . . . which then as a result greatly increased my sensitivity to the natural world’. 5 Monika Tichacek Monika Tichacek Breathing dark soil maze