“We have to fight to preserve our child selves,” says Del Kathryn Barton.
It’s the day before the opening of her new exhibition, The Highway is a Disco, at NGV Australia. There is still clanking, thumping and hammering going on inside the multi-roomed space that will house more than 150 of the two-time Archibald prize-winner’s works for the summer. This will be the biggest exhibition of Barton’s work to date, from the paintings that made her famous, to sketches, sculpture and film.
The artist herself, however, seems calm. She is seated to one side of a 10m-long, five-panel series of paintings, each containing an image of a dragon and a girl entwined together, swirling patterns of dots and waves engulfing them. This is sing blood-wings sing, a new work that will make its public debut at the Melbourne gallery this week. Like many of Barton’s paintings, its human and animal figures are almost inextricable. A whole spectrum of colour bursts from the frame, but the pinks, blues and purples are what the mind remembers.
The art of Del Kathryn Barton is a door to a jungly, fertile universe. Her paintings contain the shapes and textures of the natural world – beehives, water, spiderwebs, smooth-skinned trees, bubbles, worms, the night sky – and yet they are otherworldly. This otherworld is populated by unsmiling, anatomically bizarre characters: one has four breasts; another has sixteen eyes; another has no body at all. With their pointed noses and chins, elongated necks and limbs, these characters all have an elfin quality – even when they are direct representations of living people, such as the portrait of herself and her two children that won the Archibald in 2008, or the portrait of actor Hugo Weaving that won in 2013.
Sing blood-wings sing is Barton’s take on the story of Puff the Magic Dragon, from 1963 the folk song by Peter, Paul and Mary. (“This might be a bit sacrilegious actually,” she says, before admitting she actually prefers Will Oldham’s cover.) She’s given Puff her own characteristic spin though, replacing the male protagonists with female protagonists, and altering the “beats” – a term she uses often to talk about key thematic or narrative elements in her work – to have distinctly female elements.
“It is a coming of age work, and living with my daughter who’s 12 now, and at that very tender, fierce, vulnerable, complex age, with her changing consciousness around her body and the way that she exists in the world, I feel like there’s a lot of her in this work,” she tells Guardian Australia.
“When we think of dragons in a classical fairy story context, we think of them as slaying – forces of murder and destruction. I’ve tried to collapse that, so the blood beat speaks to menstruation as a kind of vital, proud, strong experience for a young woman.”
Barton is open and expressive with a warm and generous laugh, yet it has been a hard year: her mother’s recent death from cancer was preceded by a long period of palliative care, and Barton’s desire to be as present as possible for that meant a huge disruption to her usual creative routines, on top of the already challenging role of being a working mother.
One of the artistic consequences of that period of upheaval is the second new work on display in this exhibition: an enormous sculptural piece, at the foot of your love, which dominates an entire room. The work is comprised of a giant conch shell carved from Huon pine, which sits before a silk sail printed with a patchwork of images: flowers, breasts, sky. Ropes that transform into arms and hands stretch before the conch as if in yearning. Here, like in many of Barton’s paintings and drawings, representations of the human body are entwined with objects and natural elements in ways that are both beautiful and jarring.
Not all artists would be confident to break away from their core medium – for Barton, painting and drawing – so dramatically, but Barton says has a tendency to become bored and restless in her practice. Her exploration of alternative forms such as sculpture and film feels like “a different way of telling similar stories”, and she enjoys the challenge of bringing “some very realised aesthetic sensibilities and skill to mediums that I know nothing about.”
The work that closes off the exhibition is Red, a 15-minute filmic exploration of the “gloriously fucked up and poetic” sexual proclivities of the Australian redback spider. “I was thinking about the elemental, archetypal mother, who’s not just a mother, she’s seductress; she’s murderess, she’s epic mother,” Barton explains. The film contains real spiders and human characters; to Barton, it’s not simply a story about sexual cannibalism, but also a story about willingly sacrificing oneself for one’s children.
She had originally envisaged Red to be a short, indie project: “Something that felt a little bit more like making a drawing.” Then Cate Blanchett agreed to be attached to the work, taking it to whole new level.
The highly accomplished 44-year-old artist that Barton is today seems, on one level, a far cry from the girl who grew up in the Australian countryside with little access or exposure to fine art, and who suffered from terrifying and disorienting “body-boundary confusions and sensory disorders”. Yet that girl is immediately visible in the work itself.
“I’ve always had a very big energy in me that I have found hard to manage in some ways,” Barton says. “I ground myself through obsessive mark-making. It’s a state of very precarious balance ... it’s about how to hold a bigness in a harmonious place.”
The result is hectic and hyperactive imagery, full of rich detail and complex patterning, that is simultaneously incredibly controlled and extremely labour-intensive for the artist. “It pulls you in and pushes you back at the same time, I think,” she says of her aesthetic. “It seduces you but it slaps you round.”
Seduction here is chiefly a metaphor: Barton is surprised and frustrated to find her work, with its prolific use of the naked female form, so often framed as explicit or hyper-sexual.
“I personally am not into the pornographic body,” she says.
“The naked body is so many more things than that. It’s the private body, it’s the relaxed body in the bath, it’s the breastfeeding body ... the birthing body, the pregnant body – they’re states of being and states of body-being. And some of the most heightened pleasure zones that I personally have experienced as a woman.”
Barton’s work makes more sense when seen as a fusion of dreamscapes and deep emotional narratives – and she does often draw on her own dreams in her art. But to interpret the childlike interrogation, imagination and wonder with which those narratives are presented as naive or simplistic – or, conversely, to see them through a primarily voyeuristic lens – is to miss the point.
“I just want, ideally, people to bring much more open, porous kind of engagements to the work,” Barton says.
She refers to the “wild element of self and collective unconscious”, and it seems more than anything that her work is an exercise in turning the self – the body, the experience of physical existence – inside out: exposing that parallel life, the imaginative, emotional life that we so often repress or ignore, with all its contradictions and glories and ecstasies and fears. In that way, her characters are not so otherworldly after all, but simply representations of a forgotten way of being ourselves.
Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco is showing at NGV Australia, Melbourne, until 12 March 2018