I made this painting recently, and while looking at it again I realised how bodily it felt — almost womb-like. Womanhood in colour and movement. Perhaps the body sometimes knows before the mind does. Art that comes from the body often reaches back into it. That’s not weakness — that’s where its power is. This painting began as a physical act. I covered a previous canvas with white acrylic, a painting I had been stuck on and unhappy with for months. Over that blank surface I b

Classic Hollywood did not simply repeat the damsel in distress trope — it engineered it. Across adventure spectacle, espionage thrillers, and gothic melodrama, women are positioned in strikingly similar configurations: lifted, suspended, cornered, abducted, drowned, hunted. Their peril is rarely incidental. It is structural. The narrative moves because they are endangered. The damsel in distress is often dismissed as an outdated cliché — a relic of a less enlightened cinemat

This interview began as a commissioned catalogue text for CAVES Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair 2026. The version published here extends beyond those initial parameters, shaped by a studio visit, a sustained conversation with the artist, and photographs I took within her workspace. When I first spoke with Mira about her new works, she returned to the figure of Demeter — the mythic mother who moves between anguish and recognition, sensing her daughter’s passage between worlds. T

Every February 14, we rehearse the same ritual. Pink cards. Lace. Flowers. The language of possession disguised as devotion: Be mine. Valentine’s Day is framed as soft, sentimental, harmless. But embedded within its rituals is something older — a quiet rehearsal of heterosexual destiny. To be chosen. To be admired. To be desired. The card is not just affection; it is a claim. In 1900, on St Valentine’s Day, a group of schoolgirls climbed Hanging Rock. Some never came back. Pi

Cinema has always told women that love will change them. Sometimes this change is framed as growth, sometimes as maturity, sometimes as “finding yourself.” But more often than not, it is a quiet demand to become smaller, softer, more pleasing — to shave off the parts that disrupt desire or challenge male comfort. Across decades of film history, women are repeatedly rewarded for self-erasure and punished for remaining whole. What makes this pattern so insidious is that it is r

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is not simply a historical retelling of a saint’s trial; it is a confrontation with how women’s bodies, voices, and faces are scrutinised, doubted, and punished when they exceed the roles assigned to them. Joan of Arc is condemned not only for heresy, but for the far greater crime of certainty — of speaking with conviction in a world that does not believe women are entitled to authority, especially spiritual authority. J

Last year, I attended Don’t Shoot Darling: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, a lecture and screening held at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre in collaboration with the Australian Screen Research Collection. The evening foregrounded a lineage of feminist filmmaking that felt both urgently historical and deeply present — a reminder that women’s cinema has always been political, even when it has been intimate, domestic, or deliberately small. What struck me was not just the his