Studio Visit with Mira Gojak: Twilight, Gesture, and the Space Between Worlds

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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.

Black lines — a close study of surface and tension in Mira’s studio.

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.

The myth becomes less about spectacle and more about perception. Not abduction or rupture, but attunement — a body alert to absence, to seasonal shifts, to the fragile oscillation between loss and return.

That threshold — between darkness and emergence, containment and expansion — runs through the new twilight-blue drawings she is preparing.

The Blue That Isn’t Infinite

In the studio, Mira showed me a work still in progress. The surface carried a dense twilight blue — layered, modulated, built slowly through watercolour, acrylic, and repeated adjustments.

She had spent weeks mixing it.

“I’m trying to find the right nautical twilight blue,” she said, laughing at how long it had taken.

Nautical twilight is a precise term. In the graduated stages of dusk — civil, nautical, astronomical — nautical twilight marks the moment when the horizon line remains visible and the first stars emerge. Before satellites, sailors used this moment to navigate: a space where darkness and visibility coexist.

That idea — navigation within uncertainty — became central to the work.

The sky appears open, infinite. Yet it is an optical illusion, a result of light particles refracting through atmosphere. The blue is expansive, but limited. Bounded.

This paradox — openness contained within structure — quietly structures the drawings.

Gesture, Music, and the Cave

Detail: layered lines in slow accumulation.

The works evolved from an earlier series of large black-and-white drawings. At the time, Mira had developed RSI from her sculptural practice and turned to drawing as a way to remain in the studio while resting her body.

She would listen to music — often Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians — and draw in a state of immersion.

“You don’t judge,” she said. “You become the music.”

The gestural lines began as fluid, unselfconscious movements. But inevitably, moments of self-awareness would intrude. A mark would feel wrong. Too controlled. Too deliberate.

Instead of correcting it seamlessly, she began to paint those areas out.

“That became a thing,” she explained. “What’s the next step after the mistake?”

She described it as moving through a cave — feeling her way outward, line by line. The continuous lines expand rather than close in. They aerate the surface, much like her sculptures, which often involve cutting into solid forms to make them porous.

Gesture, for Mira, is neither purely expressive nor purely formal. It occupies a space between language and movement. As Amy Sillman has observed, “gesture exists between abstraction and figuration, between language and image.” Gojak’s drawings sit deliberately within that in-between — where marks hover between thought and bodily impulse, articulation and atmosphere.

In the twilight works, this gesture is slowed and complicated by colour.

Violet That Turns Red

Detail from drawing in progress for Melbourne Art Fair

For this series, Mira introduced violet as a complementary counterpoint to blue — a chromatic decision that initially felt restrained, transitional.

But something unexpected occurred.

Against the blue ground, the violet began to read as red.

Sinister, even.

At first, she resisted it. Bushfires had been burning. Climate change loomed in the background of daily life. The red felt too literal, too charged.

But she stayed with it.

“It’s quiet,” she said of the finished work. “But it feels like something else is there.”

That tension — serenity overlaying disturbance — mirrors the broader moment we inhabit. Catastrophe persists in the periphery. We continue working, living, navigating. The horizon remains visible, but only just.

At certain points in the composition, Mira began seeing faces emerging in the layered gestures — grimaces, apparitions. She deliberately subdued them, not wanting the viewer to fall into a rabbit-duck optical trap where figuration becomes the dominant reading.

The ambiguity remains. The suggestion of presence without declaration.

Studio detail — textures and colours

Demeter, Breath, and Curvature

Drawings in the artist's studio

The curved forms that inhabit these works carry a deeply personal resonance.

Several years ago, Mira’s mother died of Alzheimer’s disease. Sitting beside her in hospital, she paid close attention to her breathing — the rhythm of inhale and exhale, the fragile continuity of life marked by rise and fall.

Those arcs — gentle, expanding curves — enter the drawings as repeated shapes. Not literal representations, but embodied echoes.

The Demeter myth returns here in another register. A mother attuned to loss. A body registering absence. A world oscillating between descent and return.

These works are not narrative illustrations of myth, but mythic in structure: cyclical, seasonal, suspended between worlds.

Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, and the Restraint of Emotion

Mira cites Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin as touchstones — two painters whose practices appear radically different yet share a generosity of vision.

From Mitchell, she draws a muscular, expansive gestural energy. From Martin, a quiet discipline — grids and subtle modulations that hold emotion without theatricality.

Both artists, she notes, feel “sane” and “generous.” Even at their most intense, they resist domination.

There are also echoes of pre-Renaissance painting — particularly Fra Angelico — whose use of colour carries tenderness and spiritual charge, yet remains composed, measured.

Mira’s drawings attempt to inhabit that intersection: movement and restraint. Speed and stillness. Expansion without collapse.

Twilight Fills the Trees

The central work carries the title Twilight Fills the Trees — elliptical, poetic. Mira often draws from poetry for her titles, including Louise Glück’s writing on Demeter and Persephone. The language is suggestive rather than explanatory.

Twilight, she observes, is a busy hour. Birds return to roost. People move homeward. The world transitions.

It is a time of navigation.

In these works, twilight becomes both atmosphere and metaphor. The blue field holds potential infinity while acknowledging its limits. The violet-red gestures pulse beneath the surface. Lines expand outward, refusing enclosure.

If Persephone’s myth foregrounds rupture, Demeter’s foregrounds attunement — a mother sensing the movement of her daughter between realms.

Mira’s drawings inhabit that attunement. They are not dramatic. They are not declarative.

They are navigational.

Standing in her studio, the surfaces felt still. But not passive.

They hold the horizon — just visible — and the first star.

Studio floorboards marked by material and process.