Detail from Apophenie Junk Pile Apophenie Junk Pile — Catalogue Essay Bonnie-Jean Whitlock Red Gallery, Fitzroy North, June 18 - July 4 Bonnie’s paintings do not begin from representation so much as sensation. Their surfaces register movement through material: pigment absorbed into linen, wax resisting ink, and salt redistributing colour into unpredictable formations. In conversation, Bonnie described her process as collaborative with materials — an ongoing negotiation between intention and response in which materials redirect gestures and introduce moments of resistance, delay, and transformation. Linen remains loosely stretched and responsive, while surfaces are repeatedly reworked by hand. Through these processes, the paintings resist becoming fixed images and instead retain evidence of their own making. Underlying this material process is a sustained engagement with the body — not as something directly depicted but as something distributed across surfaces. During her Masters of Fine Art, Bonnie developed a body mapping process that involved lying across fabric and tracing the shape of her body to capture bodily experience into material form. Different colours, shapes and lines corresponded to sensations, emotional states, and moments of bodily awareness. Fabric became less a support than a site of registration: a surface capable of holding memory, touch, and time. That relationship continues through the current work. Brushstrokes remain visible and raw; pigment stains seep through the reverse of the linen, embedding themselves into the material rather than resting on top of it. Looking at the back of the paintings becomes almost as revealing as viewing the front. The works do not conceal their process — they expose accumulation, absorption, and change. There is a geological quality to this approach. Bonnie spoke about rocks, lichen, layering, and the experience of remaining steady within a shifting world. Her paintings move in a similar way: building slowly through deposits of gesture and material interaction. Feelings emerge indirectly, often through repetition and extended duration rather than immediate expression. What emerges is a practice grounded in tactility and embodied attention. These works do not present a sanitised or detached image of experience; instead they ask what painting can hold. Sensation becomes sedimented into surfaces. Touch remains visible. The work becomes less an image than a record — of contact, resistance, and the ongoing conversation between body and material. Within the context of Apophenie Junk Pile, these paintings can be understood as part of a process of accumulation and reworking where materials and gestures are continually reconnected, reinterpreted and held in relation. Meaning emerges through these unstable linkages — through the same logic of apophenia that draws connections across fragments, residues and dispersed sensations. Detail from Apophenie Junk Pile Reflection Earlier this year, I visited Bonnie-Jean Whitlock in her studio in the lead-up to her exhibition Apophenie Junk Pile. The visit offered an intimate insight into her working process, where she spoke generously about the material logics underpinning her practice — including wax resist techniques, salt dispersal, pigment absorption, and the ongoing responsiveness of linen as a surface. Following this studio visit, Bonnie commissioned me to write a catalogue essay for the exhibition. The writing developed directly from our conversation and from observing the ways her paintings operate through material negotiation rather than fixed representation. It became an opportunity to think closely about how her practice holds sensation, memory, and bodily experience within processes of making that remain visibly unresolved. The essay considers Bonnie’s paintings as sites where material and body are deeply entangled, though not in a direct or illustrative sense. Instead, the works register bodily presence through indirect means: through staining, layering, resistance, and transformation. Pigment seeps into linen, wax interrupts flow, and salt redistributes colour across the surface, producing compositions that feel responsive and alive rather than controlled. Bonnie also discussed her earlier body mapping work developed during her Masters of Fine Art, where fabric became a surface for tracing bodily sensation. Lying across cloth, she translated emotional and physical states into colour and gesture, creating works where the body is present as trace rather than figure. This relationship continues to shape her current paintings, where surfaces act as sites of registration for touch, time, and movement. There is a geological sensibility that runs through the work — a sense of layering, erosion, and accumulation that echoes natural processes such as sedimentation or the growth of lichen. The paintings unfold slowly, building through repeated gestures and material interactions that resist resolution. Rather than offering immediate visual clarity, they hold time within their surfaces. Ultimately, the essay positions Bonnie’s practice as one grounded in tactility and embodied attention. These are works that do not present a detached or sanitised image of experience. Instead, they ask what painting can hold when understood as a record of contact — where sensation becomes embedded within material, and where touch remains visible long after the moment of making. Within the broader context of Apophenie Junk Pile, the works can also be understood as part of an ongoing process of accumulation and reworking, where meaning emerges through fragmented connections between material, gesture, and sensation. In this sense, the exhibition itself operates through a similar logic of apophenia — drawing relationships between dispersed elements to form shifting, unstable readings of experience. It was a pleasure to engage closely with her practice and to consider how writing can extend the material and conceptual concerns of an exhibition beyond the gallery space. Oh, how the mighty have. Oil, ink, wax and glass beads on Linen

Edition 762 of The Big Issue Australia — “New Romantics", Interview with Angourie Rice, p.30-31. A few months ago, I published my first feature with The Big Issue — a conversation with poet Nikita Gill about mythology, girlhood and storytelling. Last month, I had the opportunity to publish a second feature with the magazine, this time interviewing Australian actor and writer Angourie Rice. The piece centred around Finding Emily, a romantic comedy set in Manchester, but our conversation moved far beyond the film itself. We spoke about character building, psychology, writing, creativity, and the strange balancing act between intellect and emotion that sits at the heart of Emily’s story. What struck me most was how much Angourie thinks about storytelling. Whether she was discussing acting, writing novels with her mother, or building a character through costume and music, everything came back to the same idea: how stories help us communicate things we can’t always articulate elsewhere. As someone who works across writing, art and film criticism, I found that particularly interesting. Going into the interview, I expected to talk about filmmaking. Instead, we ended up discussing creative process, character, and the way artists build worlds from small details. Some of my favourite moments were hearing about the films that inspired Finding Emily, the playlists she created for the character, and the thought that went into making Emily feel like a real person rather than a rom-com archetype. The experience itself was also a reminder of how much journalism is built on conversation. Every interview is different. Some feel highly structured; others unfold naturally into unexpected directions. Angourie’s openness made it easy to move between discussing the film, her upcoming novel, and broader questions about creativity. Seeing the finished feature in print has been especially meaningful. It marks my second publication with The Big Issue, and another step in a writing practice that continues to evolve through interviews, criticism and cultural journalism. Looking back, I realise both my features for the magazine have explored people working in very different fields, yet connected by a shared investment in storytelling. Whether through poetry, fiction or film, both conversations returned to the same question: how do we make sense of ourselves through narrative? You can read the full feature in The Big Issue Edition #762 or via the article archive on my website.

Rough & Cut, Coober Pedy Originally published in Esperanto Magazine, The Candid Edition, Issue 1, 2026 (print) Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Melbourne-based photographer Abigail Varney for the first 2026 edition of Esperanto, Monash University’s student arts and culture magazine. The issue, themed Candid, explored ideas surrounding authenticity, observation, and what it means to capture people honestly — concepts that immediately made me think of Varney’s photographic practice. Just before the pitch list for the edition was released, I visited the exhibition Familial at Town Hall Gallery (Hawthorn Arts Centre), where I encountered Varney’s work. Her photographs stayed with me long after leaving the exhibition. There was something deeply attentive about the way she photographed people and environments — moments that felt intimate without becoming intrusive, humorous without feeling performative. When the Through the Expert’s Eye prompt appeared in the pitch list, asking contributors to interview a professional photographer about candid photography and the psychology of the camera, I immediately put my name down and emailed Abigail almost straight away. Varney’s WILJUL in Familial at Town Hall Gallery The interview focused on candid photography: the relationship between photographer, subject, and camera, and the ways photographers navigate authenticity in an image-saturated world. Speaking with Abigail was incredibly insightful, particularly hearing her discuss documentary photography as a process of observation rather than control. She described candid photography as “trying to be unseen,” comparing the photographer to “a fly on the wall,” while also acknowledging the complexities of photographing people in an era where cameras are constantly present. One of the most interesting aspects of our conversation was hearing about how differently people respond to being photographed. Abigail spoke about the importance of patience, trust, and sensitivity — describing the process of building comfort with subjects as a “slow burn.” Rather than forcing a moment, she allows interactions and environments to unfold naturally, embracing unpredictability instead of resisting it. As she reflected during the interview, “nothing is in your control… that’s where the magic happens.” The Dirty Bloomers, my beloved basketball team (2018–ongoing). We also discussed projects including The Dirty Bloomers, her ongoing series photographing her beloved basketball team, and her vibrant photographs from the Parkes Elvis Festival commissioned by The New York Times. Throughout the conversation, what became clear was her deep interest in communities, humour, and the subtle dynamics between people. Her photographs often capture fleeting gestures, interactions, and moments of absurdity that reveal something deeply human. Another particularly moving part of the interview was hearing about the influence of her father’s photography. Abigail described growing up around photographs documenting everyday life, relationships, and moments of humour — images that shaped her understanding of photography as observation rather than performance. That sense of intimacy and attentiveness continues throughout her work today. I’m incredibly grateful to Abigail for being so generous with her time, insight, and photographs throughout this process. Conducting this interview reminded me how valuable conversations with artists can be — not only for understanding creative practice, but for reconsidering the ways we look at people, environments, and everyday moments ourselves. The full article can be read below: In an image-saturated world where a camera is almost always anticipated, the idea of a “candid” moment feels increasingly complex. For Melbourne-based photographer Abigail Varney, candid photography is not simply about spontaneity — it is about navigating presence, distance, and the delicate psychology between photographer and subject. Varney’s connection to candid photography is deeply personal, shaped by her father’s photographs. His work — featuring fragments of everyday life, relationships, and quiet humour — offers an early understanding of photography not as performance, but as observation. Rough & Cut, Coober Pedy. Varney’s practice sits between documentary and portraiture. There is a consistent attentiveness to human behaviour and communities: gestures, glances, and interactions that feel unguarded, even when the camera is not entirely invisible. “The whole part of candid photography is basically trying to be unseen,” she explains. “You’re like a fly on the wall.” In these moments, the photographer recedes, allowing scenes to unfold without direct intervention. Yet this distance is not always fixed. Varney describes how her position shifts depending on whether she is an outsider entering a community or an insider photographing people she already knows. In The Dirty Bloomers, Varney photographs her beloved basketball team; familiarity alters the dynamic — subjects may look back at the camera, acknowledging her presence, but without the stiffness of posed portraiture. The Dirty Bloomers, my beloved basketball team’(2018–ongoing). This tension between visibility and invisibility sits at the core of candid photography. While the aim may be to capture authenticity, the presence of the camera inevitably shapes behaviour. “People want to be perceived in a certain way,” Varney notes. Rather than resisting this, her approach is grounded in patience and sensitivity. Building trust is a “slow burn”: introducing herself, stating her intentions, and gradually allowing subjects to relax into the moment. Over time, guarded performances soften, and something more instinctive begins to surface. Build Up Unlike studio-based portraiture, where lighting, composition, and interaction are carefully controlled, candid photography operates within unpredictability. “Nothing is in your control…you just have to go with it.” Yet it is precisely within this lack of control that something unexpected can emerge, Varney reflects, as “that’s where the magic happens.” For Varney, candid photography reveals a sense of people as they exist within their own rhythms. “They’re doing something — they’re not posing for you… it’s like a 3D live mode,” she explains. In contrast, portraiture can sometimes produce what she describes as a “fake bond,” a constructed intimacy between photographer and subject that feels fundamentally different from the unscripted interactions of everyday life. How the King of Rock ’n’ Roll Still Makes Australia Sing, Parkes Elvis Festival (commissioned by The New York Times, 2022). Her photographs frequently capture moments of humour and subtle absurdity, particularly within communal settings. In her ‘Parkes Elvis Festival’ series, commissioned by ‘The New York Times’, she recalls an image of two figures in earnest conversation, dressed as Elvis Presley. Framed by out-of-focus impersonators in the foreground, the composition gently obscures and reveals, heightening the scene’s character and ambiguity. How the King of Rock ’n’ Roll Still Makes Australia Sing, Parkes Elvis Festival (commissioned by The New York Times, 2022). In large, celebratory environments like festivals, subjects often welcome the camera, performing for it rather than retreating from it. In smaller or more intimate settings, however, trust becomes essential. Varney adapts to each situation intuitively, emphasising that there is “no real framework” for working with people — only a responsiveness to the energy of each encounter. Ultimately, candid photography resists a singular definition. It exists somewhere between observation and participation, control and surrender. For Varney, its power lies in its openness: an ability to hold contradiction, to capture both the performed and the unguarded at once. In relinquishing control, the photograph recognises a moment — fleeting, imperfect, and, perhaps because of that, real. Esperanto Magazine, The Candid Edition, Issue 1, 2026 (print)

Originally published in Esperanto Magazine, The Explorer Edition, Issue 4, 2025 (print) The full article can be read below: The Nicholas Building elevator has a way of making me feel like I’m travelling somewhere secret. The doors close, the world outside blurs and when they open, I’ve arrived in a quieter part of the city. Not higher, exactly — just elsewhere. I think that’s what keeps drawing me back to Melbourne’s smaller galleries — places like Blindside Artist Run Initiative, CAVES, No Vacancy, fortyfivedownstairs — those rooms tucked inside old buildings, cafés or hidden behind restaurant staircases. Sometimes it’s even further out, like Heide or Villa Alba, the old mansion that hosted Melbourne’s first Sculpture Biennial last year. The elaborate trompe l’oeil murals there transport you from the quiet suburbs of Kew to far-off landscapes. At the Spring1883 Art Fair, held in the gilded rooms of the Windsor Hotel, the same feeling unfolded — contemporary works folding themselves into patterned carpets and chandeliers, proof that art is always in conversation with its surroundings. It isn’t the spectacle or the prestige that matters to me. It’s the way the city shifts when I step inside these spaces. Time loosens. Tightness begins to soften. In those rooms, art isn’t something to hurry through — it’s something to breathe with. It shifts and changes depending on where it’s held — always shaped by the space around it. I keep coming back to art not just for its beauty, but for the way it helps me make sense of things I can’t always put into words. It reminds me how to feel again, quietly — through texture, colour and the smallest of gestures. There’s something about the way art holds contradiction that I find comforting: joy and sorrow, stillness and movement, solitude and connection. Walking through an exhibition becomes a kind of private ritual. I bring my phone, camera and journal and let the world slow down. Sometimes, in those small rooms, I remember that thinking doesn’t always need to be loud in order to mean something. People often talk about Melbourne’s “arts scene” as though it’s confined to institutions — the archives and marble floors of the National Gallery of Victoria, or the clean certainty of a state collection. But there are so many more spaces than that. There are artist-run initiatives hidden above stores. Pop-up shows in old warehouses. Newly-opened galleries run by young curators like Hayden’s Gallery who pour everything they have into keeping them alive. Some of the most moving work I’ve seen recently wasn’t in a museum — it was in a hallway in Fitzroy, or a tiny room overlooking Swanston Street. Maybe that’s my version of exploring —tracing a path through the overlooked corners of my own city. The underground isn’t always dark or edgy. Sometimes it’s tender. Sometimes it’s being the only visitor in a gallery and realising you’re allowed to stand there for as long as you need. There’s a kind of strength in the early career art scene. It’s constantly shifting, like a living thing. That’s part of what makes it so beautiful: you can never step into the same space twice. The shows change every few weeks. The walls get repainted. The light moves on. But something stays with you — the memory of a line, or a shadow, or a quiet moment that made you feel less alone. Art doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t erase grief or make life less confusing. But it offers you a different way of holding it. And maybe that’s why I keep returning to these spaces — to remember how to sit with everything that doesn’t quite make sense and to find, in the cracks and corridors of this city, a small reminder that I’m not the only one searching for meaning. Cultivating Melbourne’s Art Scene, artwork by Jennifer Chen, Esperanto Magazine, The Explorer Issue, Vol. 4, 2025 (print).

Edition 759 of The Big Issue Australia — “Goddess Only Knows”, p.30-31. There is something strangely disorienting about seeing your work in print for the first time. Not on a screen, not in a draft folder, not in a Google Doc you can endlessly adjust — but fixed. Held. Circulating in the world without you. My recent feature on Nikita Gill, published in The Big Issue (Edition 759), began as a conversation about myth and girlhood. But somewhere in the process, it became something else — a reflection on voice, on who gets to speak, and what it means to write from within structures that don’t always make space for you. The process of writing it was one thing. The process of editing it — of letting it shift, soften, expand for a broader audience — was another. I think this is something I’m still learning: writing doesn’t exist in isolation. It moves through other people. Through editors, publications, readers. It becomes collaborative, even when it starts as something deeply personal. There were moments where I felt protective over certain phrases, certain rhythms. Moments where I wondered if the piece was still entirely mine. But seeing it now, in its final form, I can recognise something else — not a loss of voice, but an evolution of it. A translation. Being published in The Big Issue also carries a weight beyond the writing itself. It’s a publication that exists within a social framework, one that directly supports vendors and communities. That context matters. It changes how the work sits in the world. This feels like a beginning. Not in a dramatic sense, but in a quiet, steady one. Something that says: this is possible. You can read the full piece via the link on my website, or in print through The Big Issue.

Scars of Site, 2026, Poem and digital photograph For World Poetry Day, I wanted to share a piece that sits at the edge of language — where writing begins to fail slightly, and the body takes over. The poem below began with a question that felt difficult to articulate directly:what happens to the body when something is seen that cannot be un-seen? We often think of vision as passive — as something that simply receives the world. But this poem resists that idea. It understands seeing as an event. Something that enters, alters, and remains. The lines move through the language of damage and adaptation: scorching, clouding, softening. The eye becomes not just an organ of perception, but a site of negotiation — caught between exposure and protection. What begins as clarity gradually becomes something more unstable, more defensive. Vision shifts from openness to refusal. This is where the body becomes central. Because the poem suggests that when the mind cannot process something fully, the body intervenes. It adjusts perception. It blurs. It filters. Not as failure — but as survival. What began to interest me was the idea that the eyes themselves might respond — not just emotionally,  As if vision could scar. In the poem, the irises are imagined as something that has been burned — held too long in proximity to something unbearable. Not destroyed, but altered. Marked. The suggestion of cataracts forming becomes less medical and more symbolic: a thin veil growing across the surface of sight, not as failure, but as intention. A self-made obstruction. As though the body, unable to erase what has been seen, attempts instead to dim it. To soften its edges. To place something — anything — between itself and the image. It is not blindness. It is refusal. And yet, the poem resists the idea that this strategy can ever fully succeed. Because even when vision is interrupted, the image does not disappear. It relocates. It persists behind the eyes — fixed, internal, unreachable. Something that returns in fragments, especially in moments of stillness. In darkness. In the quiet just before sleep. You can close your eyes, but you cannot unsee. That tension — between wanting not to see and being unable to forget — sits at the centre of the work. And perhaps that is where it becomes most personal. Because the body does not simply witness. It carries. The idea that  “clarity itself had become dangerous”  is crucial here. It reframes visibility not as truth, but as risk. Beneath the poem, the image operates as a visual extension of this idea. A face appears behind water filled glass — distorted, partially obscured. The surface is marked with droplets that could be condensation, breath, or time itself. They resemble tears, but never fully resolve into them. The figure is visible, but not fully accessible. Most importantly, the eye — the site of perception — is present, yet disrupted. It is seen, but not clearly.It looks, but cannot fully hold what it sees. The image and the poem work together to explore a shared tension: the impossibility of clean vision. There is always interference. Always a surface. Always something between. Even the structure of the poem reflects this. Certain lines are tightened — the spacing between letters reduced: It marks. There it is again. as though clarity itself had become dangerous. But the body does not forget. These moments interrupt the visual rhythm of the text. They feel compressed, almost held in place. Less like lines to be read, and more like points of pressure — where language condenses into something harder, more insistent. They do not flow. They resist. That resistance mirrors the poem’s central idea: that some experiences do not integrate smoothly into narrative or memory. They return in fragments. They interrupt. They insist on being felt rather than explained. What remains, in the end, is not a clear image, but an internal one. An afterimage. Something that no longer exists in front of the body, but continues to exist within it — lodged behind the eyes, beyond reach, beyond language. Poetry, at its most precise, does not resolve this kind of experience. It doesn’t offer closure. It simply gives it form. I think this is why I’m drawn to writing like this — where the line between seeing and feeling dissolves. Where the body speaks in ways language can only partially hold. Full poem below: Scars of Sight Seeing is not passive. It enters the body. It marks. There are images that do not leave politely— they press themselves into the softest part of vision and stay there, unmoving. At first it was only a brightness. A kind of overexposure. As if the world had been held too close to flame. Then something in the eyes began to change. The irises— once clear, reflective— felt scorched, like glass left too long in heat. I began to imagine a thin film forming just beneath the surface, a clouding, a slow and careful obscuring, as though the body were trying to grow its own curtain. Not blindness— something more deliberate than that. A refusal. Because there are things the eyes should not have to carry. And yet they do. Even closed, the image persists— fixed behind the lids like an afterburn, like light that has nowhere else to go. I learned the way it returns without warning— in the dark, in quiet rooms, in the small pause before sleep when the body softens and the mind loosens its grip. There it is again. Not whole— never whole— but in fragments: a colour a movement a shape that cannot be unnamed enough to know too much to escape. The body, always adapting, began its quiet work. If the world wounds through sight, then sight must be altered. So the eyes dimmed themselves— softened edges blurred distances let detail dissolve as though clarity itself had become dangerous. As though to see less might be a form of survival. I wondered if this is how forgetting begins— not as absence but as interference, a gentle distortion laid carefully over memory like gauze over a wound. But the body does not forget. It stores. It reroutes. It buries light in darker places. And so the image remains, not in front of me but within me— stitched somewhere behind the eyes, where no hand can reach it, where no closing of the lids can undo what has already been seen. Some images do not leave. They change the way we see everything that comes after.

The Storm Within , 2026, Acrylic, oil paint and oil stick on canvas, 30 × 40 cm 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 began working with oil paint and oil stick, not with brushes but with my fingers while wearing gloves. At one point the glove tore and the oil paint slipped beneath my nails, staining them deep red with a hint of blue. I remember looking down at my hands and thinking how strangely beautiful it felt — colour sitting under the skin like something elemental. Weeks later my nail is still stained with blue. That blue almost feels invasive. A colour so often coded by society as “masculine,” yet here it exists only as a small presence within the painting — and still it seeped into my body, into my skin and nails, as though claiming space. The painting that emerged feels intensely bodily to me. The palette moves through crimson, rose, mauve and deep brown — colours that feel almost internal, like flesh, blood, or the interior darkness of the womb. At the centre there is a softness, a pale luminosity surrounded by darker pigments that swirl around it protectively. It reminds me of those cinematic moments where light passes through the body during birth scenes, where life is suggested as something glowing and fragile within shadow. It feels maternal in a way that is difficult to explain. Not simply motherhood, but something older: the idea that women have always carried the possibility of life within them. The body as origin. The fact that the paint was moved by hand matters too. There is something intimate about touching the canvas directly, about feeling the oil drag and smear beneath your fingers. The painting wasn’t constructed at a distance. It was made through contact. While on a Zoom meeting with poet Nikita Gill — for a project I’ll be sharing more about soon — she noticed the painting behind me and said something that stayed with me: “It reminds me of standing in a storm.” I love that description. Storms are powerful, unpredictable, alive. They are not passive things — they reshape landscapes. Perhaps womanhood can feel like that too: movement, force, creation, endurance. The painting moves through colours historically tied to the body — blood, skin, flesh, interiority. Yet they also evoke something cosmic: nebulae, clouds, shifting atmospheres. That duality matters — the intimate and the universal at once. The composition pulls the eye inward. There’s a light, almost glowing centre surrounded by darker pigments that swirl around it. It feels protective, almost uterine. The darker edges could be read as the world pressing in — gravity, history, expectation — while the luminous centre suggests life, potential, creation. Finger painting is often associated with childhood, but here it becomes something more primal. My hands physically moved the paint like matter — like clay, like flesh. The broken glove and the pigment beneath my nails reinforce the idea of the body making the image. The painting isn’t distant or controlled. It is tactile, embodied. The small hint of blue remains intriguing to me. Because it is not dominant, it feels like something submerged, quietly breaking through the surface. Blue can suggest calm, depth, distance — even melancholy. Here it interrupts the red field gently, like breath within heat or thought within instinct. In a painting that feels so bodily, that blue might represent the mind within the body — a reminder that identity, especially female identity, is layered and never singular. Nothing in the painting is rigid. Everything swirls, presses and dissolves into itself, giving it a sense of movement. That fluidity echoes cycles often culturally associated with femininity — menstruation, pregnancy, birth, renewal. It feels less like a static image and more like something forming. To be a woman in the world is complicated. It is powerful and vulnerable, creative and exhausting, celebrated and overlooked all at once. But it is also the beginning of everything. Every life begins in the body of a woman. Every history begins there too. And as I write these words I find myself becoming emotional. Maybe that is why the painting feels less like an image and more like something alive. Today, on International Women’s Day, this painting feels like a quiet reminder: the body remembers what the world often forgets.

Still from King Kong (1933), directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 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 cinematic era. But to reduce it to naivety is to misunderstand its function. The trope is not accidental weakness. It is narrative architecture. Women in classical cinema frequently operate as: currency leverage emotional stakes moral alibi They are not always powerless. In fact, many begin as intelligent, spiritually complex, or sexually autonomous. But the narrative machine bends them toward vulnerability. It requires their exposure in order to justify male movement. The damsel trope’s persistence across genres and decades suggests something more systemic. The trope does not simply reflect patriarchy; it stabilises narrative tension. It converts male pursuit into heroism. It transforms aggression into virtue. The damsel is not a character flaw; it does not require women to be weak. It requires them to be positioned. She is a storytelling device that transforms male action into heroism. Still from The Night of the Hunter  (1955), directed by Charles Laughton Beauty and the Colonial Spectacle: King Kong (1933) In  King Kong  , directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the damsel trope is staged at operatic scale. Released in 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression, the film is frequently celebrated for its ground-breaking stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien. Kong’s movement was revolutionary. The Empire State Building finale remains an early triumph of cinematic illusion. But technological innovation does not neutralise ideological structure. Ann Darrow played by Fay Wray Ann Darrow — blonde, pale, dressed in a light-toned gown that glows against jungle darkness — becomes the film’s emotional hinge. She begins as a poor woman — a beggar chosen from the street by Carl Denham to star in his adventure film. Her economic vulnerability already positions her as available — plucked, transported, displayed. The mise-en-scène repeatedly isolates her body in contrast to overwhelming environments: dense foliage, towering gates, cavernous New York skylines. She is framed as fragile against scale. Her whiteness is visually central. On Skull Island, Ann is offered to Kong as ritual sacrifice by Indigenous inhabitants depicted through heavily racialised imagery rooted in colonial fantasy. The island sequences rely on caricature: the “primitive” tribe, the exotic ritual, the dark, threatening landscape. Ann’s pale body is staged as luminous contrast — civilisation against savagery, purity against excess. Kong holding Ann as the pterodactyl attacks Translated by Captain Englehorn, the Native Chief describes Ann as the “golden woman.” Carl Denham responds flippantly: “Yeah, blondes are scarce around here.” The line is played for humour, yet it exposes the logic of fetishisation: her rarity is eroticised; her blondness becomes a commodity. The irony is sharp: Ann is impoverished and expendable in New York — yet on Skull Island her whiteness renders her mythic. Jack Driscoll, the ship’s first mate, initially declares he doesn’t like women on ships. Ann teases him: Ann Darrow: “I thought you didn’t like women.” Jack Driscoll: “Yeah, but you’re not women.” The line is revealing. Ann is singularised — elevated above “women” as a category. She becomes exception, ideal, object of protection rather than equal participant. Their flirtation is brisk, almost perfunctory, yet once she is taken by Kong, Driscoll’s devotion crystallises instantly. He risks his life repeatedly for a woman he barely knows. Her abduction authorises his courage. Jack holding Ann unconscious, surrounded by the ship crew. The hero’s stance crystallises: masculine strength defined through the display of a limp female body. Kong’s fascination with Ann is framed as monstrous — yet the film’s narrative logic mirrors that desire. She is captured, displayed, reclaimed. The camera lingers on her screams, her fainting spells, her thrashing body in Kong’s grip. Her distress fuels spectacle. Kong atop the Empire State Building Back in New York, the illusion of safety collapses into exhibition. Kong is chained and displayed on a stage — another spectacle of possession. When he breaks free and climbs the Empire State Building, the verticality intensifies the trope. Ann is suspended between earth and sky, reduced to a luminous figure in a giant’s hand. The planes circle. The city watches. The nation looks upward. All of it exists because she has been seized. The line — “It was beauty killed the beast” — appears to blame Ann. But what truly kills Kong is not beauty. It is the compulsion to own beauty. To capture it. To chain it. To exhibit it. Without Ann’s endangerment, there is no climb, no pursuit, no climax. She is not simply a victim. She is narrative ignition.   And in the end, she is rescued by a man. Jack Driscoll pulls her from the wreckage as Kong falls. The spectacle concludes not with her agency, but with her restoration to masculine protection. The beast dies. The woman survives. The hero remains. Jack holding Ann atop the Empire State Building The Garden and the Fall: North by Northwest (1959) By the time  North by Northwest  premiered in 1959, Hollywood had refined the damsel into sophistication. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the film introduces Eve Kendall not as helpless, but as commanding. She is elegant, perceptive, sexually assertive. On the train, she engineers Roger Thornhill’s escape. She initiates flirtation. She appears in control of her image and her intelligence. Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint Her name is crucial. Eve. In Genesis, Eve is the first woman — associated with temptation, knowledge, transgression. She reaches for the forbidden fruit. She acts. Her agency destabilises paradise. She becomes origin point of the Fall. Hitchcock’s Eve similarly operates at the threshold of duplicity and revelation. She exists between surfaces — lover and spy, seductress and strategist. She possesses knowledge before Thornhill does. She manipulates appearances. She navigates masculine espionage networks with calculated composure. Like her biblical counterpart, she is associated with knowledge — and knowledge is destabilising. For much of the film, Eve is not a damsel. She saves Thornhill. She withholds information. She orchestrates deception. She occupies desire without surrendering authority. Roger Thornhill played by Cary Grant and Eve Kendall But classical narrative cannot allow such authority to remain uncontained. As the film progresses, the mise-en-scène increasingly situates her in enclosed or precarious spaces: train compartments, hotel rooms, the cliff edges of Mount Rushmore. The visual field tightens. Her composure gives way to emotional exposure once her double-agent status is revealed. The age gap between Cary Grant (in his mid-50s) and Eva Marie Saint (in her mid-30s) reinforces subtle hierarchy. Grant embodies polished maturity, paternal confidence. Eve’s modernity — sleek, intelligent, sexually forward — is gradually repositioned beneath his stability. Still from North by Northwest of Mount Rushmore The climax at Mount Rushmore literalises patriarchal monumentality. The carved presidential faces loom — monumental embodiments of national fatherhood, stone patriarchy carved into landscape. Against this backdrop, Eve slips. She dangles. The image is unmistakable: the woman named Eve suspended beneath monumental fathers, her body dependent on male grip. Her autonomy, once agile and strategic, condenses into vulnerability. Thornhill pulls her upward. Eve falling from Mount Rushmore as Thornhill rescues her The rescue restores order — not merely physical safety, but symbolic hierarchy. Immediately, Hitchcock collapses suspense into marital absorption. The cut from Thornhill pulling Eve up the cliff to pulling her into a train berth is famously suggestive. The train enters a tunnel — an unmistakable sexual metaphor, especially within the constraints of the Hays Code. The train entering the tunnel. Within the limits of the Hays Code, rescue converts seamlessly into consummation; danger gives way to sanctioned intimacy. From cliff to conjugal bed. From agent to bride. Her competence is not erased — but it is absorbed into heterosexual resolution. The Fall is reversed through marriage. Knowledge gives way to domestic containment. The garden closes. The damsel machine reasserts itself. Thornhill embracing Eve protectively while she appears emotionally restrained. Masculine assurance stabilises the frame. Her composure reads less as strength than absorption into his control. Light, Shadow, and River Water: The Night of the Hunter (1955) If  North by Northwest  disguises the trope within glamour,  The Night of the Hunter  exposes it within nightmare. Directed by Charles Laughton, the film is a singular work of American expressionism. Shot in stark black-and-white, its tonal contrasts are extreme — luminous whites against engulfing shadow. Criminal Harry Powell played by Robert Mitchum The narrative begins with male crime. Ben Harper steals money and hides it inside his daughter Pearl’s doll before being executed. The money becomes gravitational centre — innocence carrying adult corruption. Harry Powell, the false preacher with “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed across his knuckles, learns of the hidden money in prison. Upon release, he seeks out Harper’s widow, Willa. Willa’s name derives from a Germanic root meaning “resolute protection.” The irony is devastating. She cannot protect herself. She cannot protect her children. Powell weaponises scripture. He reframes female sexuality as sin. He isolates Willa within domestic space, convincing her that desire is shameful. In a Depression-era context, her economic vulnerability intensifies her dependence. After murdering her, Powell tells neighbours she ran off. When asked what possessed her, he replies: “Satan.” He claims he did his best to save her. Religious language becomes cover for violence. The murder image is among the most haunting in American cinema. The image aestheticises spiritual purity into stillness, rendering Willa vulnerable yet serene, almost sacred, beneath the river’s surface. The camera submerges. Willa’s body rests in a car at the river’s bottom. Her pale dress billows. Her hair floats outward, merging with river plants. The bright fabric against dark water creates eerie serenity. The composition is painterly. She appears peaceful. Asleep. Angelic. A fisherman’s line catches on the car. He looks down and sees her. The image is shockingly clear from above water — as though the film insists we witness. Meanwhile, Powell sings “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” a Protestant hymn about divine protection. Its lyrics promise safety — “safe and secure from all alarms.” In Powell’s mouth, the hymn becomes threat. Faith is hollowed into performance. Here the damsel is not screaming from a tower. She is aestheticised into stillness. Yet the film does not leave vulnerability unchallenged. The children in the boat, Pearl clutching her doll The children escape by boat in a nocturnal sequence resembling a Grimm fairy tale. Animals watch from the riverbanks. Nature becomes witness rather than predator. They are eventually taken in by Rachel Cooper (often referred to as Miss Cooper), an elderly woman who shelters abandoned children. She sits with a shotgun across her lap and confronts Powell directly. When he arrives singing his hymn, she joins in — her steady voice meeting his in eerie duet. Where he weaponises religion, she embodies moral conviction. She protects the children. Miss Cooper holding a shotgun by the window as Powell waits outside Powell is arrested and ultimately executed. Unlike  King Kong  or  North by Northwest , this film transfers moral authority to an older woman. Yet Willa’s death remains structural. Her vulnerability grants Powell entry. Her elimination escalates threat. Her body becomes icon. She is both sacrificial and luminous.   Powell holding Pearl as she looks at him like a father The Machine Across these films — 1933, 1955, 1959 — the repetition is undeniable. The genres differ: adventure fantasy, gothic thriller, espionage romance. The function persists. Women become endangered so that men can: climb skyscrapers scale monuments pursue across rivers preach righteousness perform bravery The mise-en-scène repeatedly emphasises suspension and enclosure: heights, cliffs, underwater graves, train compartments, shadowed bedrooms and spaces charged with sexual tension. Eve clutching her injured arm on Mount Rushmore The body of the woman becomes a spatial problem to be solved. Even when she begins as competent — Eve Kendall’s strategic brilliance — the narrative bends toward vulnerability. Even when she is spiritually grounded — Willa Harper’s faith — she is economically and physically cornered. The damsel trope is not about female incapacity. It is about narrative control. To endanger a woman is to raise stakes without destabilising masculine authority. A man who acts for himself risks appearing selfish. A man who acts to save a woman is heroic. The damsel provides moral alibi. She converts male violence into necessity. Classic cinema did not merely mirror patriarchal values; it refined them into story architecture. The repetition across decades reveals not coincidence but design. The machine required women to be saved. Or silenced. Or suspended long enough to make the rescue — or the revenge — feel righteous. And once you recognise the pattern — the scream, the dangling wrist, the floating hair beneath water — you begin to see how deeply the structure shaped our visual memory of heroism. The damsel was never just a character. She was the engine. Bird’s-eye view of the children lying in the boat drifting downriver The Male Gaze and Moral Alibi In 1975, Laura Mulvey published Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , arguing that classical Hollywood cinema structures looking through a male gaze. Women function as objects of visual pleasure, while men drive narrative action. Close-up of Ann screaming. The scream as cinematic engine — fear amplified into spectacle, the face of peril magnified for collective consumption. These films predate Mulvey’s essay, yet they exemplify its logic. Ann Darrow is spectacle. Eve Kendall is erotic intrigue. Willa Harper is spiritualised martyr. But Mulvey’s framework alone is not sufficient here. The damsel is not only looked at. She is endangered. Endangerment intensifies the gaze — fear and desire intertwine, making vulnerability not only visible but narratively indispensable. Willa in bed, arms crossed beneath a spotlight. Faith and repression converge; sanctified femininity framed in light before its annihilation. The gaze and the rescue operate together. Visual pleasure merges with narrative justification. The male hero not only sees the woman — he saves her. Or avenges her. The trope provides moral cover. A man climbing a skyscraper for conquest is hubristic.A man climbing to rescue a woman is heroic. A man pursuing across national monuments may seem reckless.A man saving a woman from falling is noble. A man hunting a murderer may appear violent.A community protecting children from a killer sanctifies resistance. The damsel converts violence into virtue.   Eve lighting a cigarette on the train Contemporary Echoes The machine has not disappeared. Modern cinema often appears to reject the trope — presenting “strong female characters,” action heroines, self-rescuing protagonists. Yet the structure frequently persists beneath updated surfaces. Superhero origin stories repeatedly hinge on female endangerment as catalytic event. In  Spider-Man  (2002), Mary Jane Watson is suspended from a bridge, her falling body literalised as moral test. In  The Dark Knight  (2008), Rachel Dawes’ death does not merely wound Bruce Wayne — it legitimises escalation. Her elimination authorises his transformation. The pattern extends beyond caped mythology. Revenge narratives frequently motivate male protagonists through murdered wives and daughters. The woman’s body becomes narrative ignition once more — less a subject than a trigger. Even when women fight — as in contemporary action franchises — they are often narratively instrumentalised. Their competence may be foregrounded, but their vulnerability remains a reliable mechanism for raising stakes. The damsel has evolved. She may wield a weapon now. She may deliver sharp dialogue. But her endangerment continues to stabilise masculine identity and justify violence. Classic cinema needed women to be saved because the rescue clarified heroism. Contemporary cinema often needs women to be harmed — or threatened — for the same reason. The machine adapts. But it rarely disappears. The fisherman’s view from above water of Willa in the submerged car

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.

Picnic Scene Still: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), directed by Peter Weir 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. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), directed by Peter Weir and adapted from Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, transforms Valentine’s Day into something uncanny. The film is not about romance; it is about disappearance. And yet it is saturated with longing — longing from men, longing between girls, longing for something that cannot be named. The film asks a question Valentine’s Day never does: What if a girl refuses to be chosen at all?   The Performance of Girlhood Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock  (1975) At Appleyard College, femininity is rehearsed like a discipline. The girls are corseted, gloved, encased in white muslin that resembles both communion dress and bridal gown. The costuming is deliberate — high collars, fitted waists, ribbons. They recite French. They practice posture. They are instructed in deportment and refinement. They are being prepared — not for adventure, not for intellectual autonomy — but for presentation, for marriage. Miranda Reflected Through Mirrors: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) The mise-en-scène inside the college reinforces this containment. Heavy Victorian furniture crowds the frame. Floral wallpaper presses inward. Mirrors recur throughout the film, quietly doubling the girls’ images. They are reflected, refracted, split. The mirror does not simply show them who they are; it reminds us they are always being watched — by the institution, by men, by the camera itself. Cutting the Cake: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) The film is set at the turn of the century — 1900 — a temporal threshold. The end of the Victorian era. The beginning of modernity. A cultural shift humming beneath corsetry and colonial propriety. The year itself feels symbolic: something is about to rupture. The Valentine’s Day picnic is supposed to be charming. A supervised outing. A controlled exposure to nature. Yet even before the disappearance, the atmosphere destabilises. The girls eat cake beneath filtered sunlight. Ants later crawl across the icing — sugary, ornamental, faintly grotesque. The sweetness is invaded. Clocks stop at midday. Time itself seems to suspend. Everyone falls into a strange, collective sleep. Romance curdles into unease. Miranda in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), played by Anne-Louise Lambert Miranda — luminous, almost mythic — floats through the film like an apparition. She is described by Mademoiselle de Poitiers as “a Botticelli angel.” The line is not accidental. Botticelli’s women are ethereal, distant, suspended between flesh and divinity. Miranda is framed in soft focus, often haloed by light. The film’s gauzy diffusion filter bathes her in an amber glow, washing the palette in creams, golds, and pale blues. She is less person than vision. Michael Fitzhubert’s fixation after her disappearance only intensifies this transformation. He clutches a fragment of lace as if it were a relic. Valentine’s Day promises love; the film delivers obsession. Miranda becomes most powerful once she is unreachable — frozen in absence, preserved in fantasy. Cinema has long taught us that a woman’s value increases when she becomes idealised, distant, untouchable. Miranda is no longer a girl; she is a projection.   The Rock as Refusal The Hanging Rock: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Hanging Rock is volcanic, ancient, indifferent. It predates British settlement. It predates the school. It predates Valentine’s cards and corsets. Against its rough, shadowed surfaces and greenery, the girls’ white dresses look impossibly fragile — pure, virginal, bridal. The visual contrast is stark: colonial delicacy imposed upon Indigenous land. Still from the double-exposure sequence in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) The film feels dreamlike, almost hallucinatory. Weir uses slow motion, elongated pacing, and a technique often described as double exposure — layering images softly so that forms appear to bleed into one another. Faces dissolve into rock formations. Light flares across the lens. The boundaries between body and landscape blur. This is not a horror film in the conventional sense, but it carries the dread of one. The terror is atmospheric, not violent. The music deepens this instability. Zamfir’s pan flute drifts across scenes like breath — cyclical, hovering, unanchored. It refuses dramatic crescendo. It suspends us. Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) When Miranda, Marion, and Irma climb higher — with Edith trailing behind — they begin removing their gloves and stockings. The gesture is subtle, but radical. Gloves signify civility. Stockings signify modesty. To remove them is to shed discipline. To step barefoot onto rock is to feel something older than propriety. The last image of Miranda seen by Mademoiselle de Poitiers — blonde hair illuminated, body poised in stillness — feels almost sacred. Then she disappears behind stone. The landscape does not romanticise them. It swallows them. The police later theorise a male perpetrator — perhaps a bushranger, perhaps a madman lurking in the wilderness, perhaps even Michael Fitzhubert. The impulse is telling. Faced with female disappearance, authority reaches for a familiar narrative: a man must have done this. Violence must be masculine, external, explainable. The possibility that the girls slipped beyond patriarchal comprehension is more unsettling. Picnic Scene Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock  (1975) The film never explains what happens. And that absence matters. Joan Lindsay did write a final chapter — later published as  The Secret of Hanging Rock  — that offered a metaphysical explanation involving folds in time and space. In it, reality itself fractures. But her publisher insisted it be removed from the original novel. Mystery was preserved. The refusal of explanation is political. The girls are not returned to narrative order. They are not punished on-screen. They are not married off. They are not rescued. They are simply gone. What if disappearance is the only available form of autonomy?   Edith, Sarah, and the Girls Who Stay Edith Horton returns screaming, hysterical, disoriented. She becomes the sanctioned witness, yet her testimony produces no clarity. She is dismissed as overwrought. Her fear is feminised, trivialised. She survives, but survival brings no authority. Sarah Clinging to the Remnants of Miranda’s Presence: Picnic at Hanging Rock  (1975) Then there is Sarah Waybourne — the orphan who is forbidden from attending the picnic. Sarah’s attachment to Miranda is intense, devotional. She calls her an angel. She keeps tokens of affection. Her longing trembles on the edge of something romantic, though it remains unnamed. If Miranda represents transcendence, Sarah represents confinement. Denied the rock and denied Miranda, Sarah is left within the suffocating walls of Appleyard College. The mirrors return. The corridors narrow. Mrs Appleyard’s authority tightens. Where Miranda slips into myth, Sarah collapses under repression. The film allows queer undercurrents to pulse quietly beneath the surface. The girls brush each other’s hair. They recline together in dappled sunlight. They exchange glances that linger too long. Valentine’s Day insists on heterosexual pairing; the film suggests desire does not move so neatly. Desire circulates — between girls, between teacher and student, between absence and obsession.   The 2018 Series: Reframing Desire and Power In the 2018 adaptation, Marion is portrayed by Arrernte, Kalkadoon and Bundjalung actress Madeleine Madden, a casting choice that reframes the colonial landscape of the original narrative The 2018 television adaptation pushes these tensions forward. Marion is portrayed by Indigenous actress Madeleine Madden, reconfiguring the colonial landscape of the original. The presence of an Indigenous girl at the centre of the narrative unsettles the whiteness of Appleyard’s world and reframes the Rock not merely as backdrop, but as land with history and ownership. The series also renders explicit the romantic attachment between Miss McGraw and Marion. Miss McGraw’s decision to follow the girls is no longer abstract intellectual curiosity — it becomes longing. The repression is named. By foregrounding queer desire and colonial tension, the adaptation surfaces what was latent in Weir’s film: the Rock is not simply a site of mystery, but a rupture in systems of control.   True Story or Beautiful Lie? For decades, audiences believed the story was based on real events. Joan Lindsay was evasive in interviews, allowing speculation to flourish. She had attended school near the region; Hanging Rock was real; the date was precise. Tourism increased. The myth thickened. But whether it “really happened” is almost irrelevant. The story endures because it reflects something structurally true: that girlhood is often a site of projection, containment, and aestheticisation. And sometimes, rupture.   Valentine’s Day and the Politics of Being Chosen Valentine’s Day is about being selected. Desired. Claimed. Be mine. The phrase implies ownership. It suggests that love is acquisition. Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock  (1975) In  Picnic at Hanging Rock , the girls slip out of that economy entirely. They do not become wives. They do not become mothers. They do not grow into respectable Edwardian women shaped for marriage markets. They vanish before the script can complete itself. The men are left searching. The police construct rational explanations. The institution collapses. Mrs Appleyard, clinging to order and moral rigidity, ultimately falls from the Rock herself — Victorian authority undone by the very landscape it sought to tame. What unsettles audiences is not simply the mystery, but the suggestion that structures designed to shape women cannot fully contain them. That beneath lace and etiquette and Valentine cards, there is something wilder. On that St Valentine’s Day in 1900, romance gave way to rupture. The card says:  Be mine. But the Rock whispers something else. Some girls, the film suggests, choose not to be possessed at all. Still from Picnic at Hanging Rock  (1975)