Contemporary Australia: Women

86 The plots Natalya Hughes weaves into her art are byzantine — complicated and irrational. Hers is a world of soap opera controversy, though this version of The Bold and the Beautiful is R‑rated and soaked in LSD. Whatever its source, the tone of The After Party is unique, a product of her love of excess and ornamentation. Hughes crams her works with references to other artworks and artists, but you would never mistake her work for theirs. Instead, she riffs, rips, appropriates and reworks elements in a cumulative and entirely original way — identifying sources is not really the point . They simply add layers of imagery and meaning to a work that has an overabundance of both. No matter how funny, unpredictable, outrageous or lurid, there is always an idea Hughes wants to explore, usually several. The overall effect is literate, if not always legible: a swarming mass drawn from pop culture and art history mashed together and transmogrified into a three‑dimensional Rorschach. Make of it what you will. Bree Richards the embodiment of the rococo spirit, was, in its day, highly controversial for its depiction of a nobleman getting a titillating view up a lady’s skirt. In collaboration with Isobel Knowles, Hughes has also set Taco Corsage 2012 in motion. The animated version of the painting enacts a series of subtle tics and gyrations: disembodied legs kick spasmodically, and leopard‑spotted protuberances pulse in what is perhaps the most discomforting element of all. Another painting pays homage to the geometric abstraction of Sonia Delaunay’s Rythme 1938, revelling in combinations of bold colour and geometric shapes, with the addition of an optically vibrating psychedelic backdrop. With a wink and a nod, Hughes reaches across time, perhaps in a bid to reinstate Delaunay’s practice, which the artist has suggested ‘was always written off as decorative’. 1 Nearby, another canvas alludes to Kiki Smith’s Tale 1992 — a notorious sculpture featuring a naked figure on all fours, an epic turd trailing from the body like a tail. In Hughes’s pastel-hued version, the faecal is imagined as something slightly more appealing and, embellished with a rococo flourish, it emerges from a pair of hirsute beaver legs. In no other artist’s work do exaggeration and decoration meet as poignantly — albeit injected with a healthy sense of irony.