Contemporary Australia: Women

67 some relationship to a line-up of 1960s British beauty queens in glamorous swimsuits — all teeth and big hair. However, Bruce maintains that she never has an installation plan and that a sense of temporariness is key to the outcome. Each work is only a fragment, a small window of introspection . Images of whimsy — a boy puddle-hopping across rainbow bursts and a girl daydreaming amidst coloured dots — float across the void like little thought bubbles in Bruce’s adolescent fantasy of escape. Bruce’s cast of appropriated images are anonymous and isolated, but teem with possible connections — as if suggesting the existence of a code waiting to be cracked. If anything unites these fragments of a story, it is that each character is in some way closed, lost in their own thoughts and lives. Bruce’s works draw her audience into the fraught world of magazines — of empty desire and escape. The delicate detail of her drawings, together with the suggestion of a story waiting to be discovered, invites our gaze to linger and wander across the dream-like space. However, having transported her subjects and exorcised her compulsion to sort through her material, anything further, it would appear, is up to us. Zoe De Luca provides a complex and detailed comparison of the interior spaces accessible to, and therefore represented by, modernist painters Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt in comparison to their male counterparts, such as Renoir, Degas, Manet and their imaging of Paris’s bustling boulevards and risqué nightlife, which were not so accessible to women. 5 While Victorian notions of feminine propriety do not apply to Bruce’s work, there is a correlation in the evocation of private space. Christine Morrow emphasises that drawing is associated ‘with intimacy, introversion, withdrawal and quiet reflection. More so than any other visual art discipline, and in common with journal and letter writing, “drawing is the medium of the bedroom”’. 6 This can be seen in the way Bruce arranges her work: she installs her images en masse in a manner reminiscent of a teenage girl’s poster-covered bedroom — only the process of drawing interrupts the image’s journey from page to wall. The conflation of the bedroom and gallery wall exposes this private ritual for public analysis. Untitled 2010–11 contains 55 separate drawings; however, this could conceivably expand forever as Bruce continually gathers more material. The work utilises physical space as well as its subjects’ sightlines to suggest interrelationships. Viewers may spot a disenfranchised prom queen and wonder if she bears Untitled (details) 2010–11 Synthetic polymer paint and watercolour on paper 55 sheets ranging from 14.6cm x 7cm to 39.5 x 27cm Installed dimensions variable Kirsty Bruce