Published in The Sydney Morning Herald in May, 2017. It’s hard to imagine a book that resonates with our times as powerfully as The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood’s cult 1985 novel tells the story of Gilead, an authoritarian, gender-segregated state that reduces fertile women, who aren’t allowed to read, write or own property, to “handmaids” – sexual […]
Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York.
First published in VAULT, issue 15. Lisa Yuskavage isn’t afraid of being too much. The New York artist, who has spent the last quarter of a decade painting a universe peopled by feminine subjects, whose bombshell physicality – legs splayed, breasts swollen – cloak the tawdry thrill of finding an old Penthouse, tucked under your […]
First published in Daily Life, June 2015 Jessica Hopper knows that few things sting as much as the pain of self-erasure. In her 2005 essay “You’re Reliving All Over Me: Dinosaur Junior Reunites,” the trailblazing music journalist recounts an adolescent encounter that’s become a soul-destroying rite of passage for brilliant teenage girls. “I’d hung out […]
Winehouse, who grew up memorising the music of jazz greats like Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughn, might possess a voice that sounds like velvet cigarette smoke – but to undermine her artistry, we made self-destructiveness her myth. She might have dabbled in crack cocaine, but she became a tragic heroine because she dared to contain […]
First published in Daily Life April 8, 2015 There are few more satisfying payoffs in the Internet age than the practice of judging the self-obsessed. As intolerable as it is to witness a Facebook update narrating a friend’s new promotion when your career is flatlining or a real-time Instagram montage of your classmate’s wedding when […]
First published in Daily Life, November 2014. Australian art history has an alarming tendency to conflate notoriety and originality. The shiny allure that inspires cult biographies and mass hysteria among collectors, like in the case of Adam Cullen or Brett Whitely, isn’t just down to talent – it’s also about the ways in which the […]
Image credit: Meg Minkley
Published in Broadsheet July 2014 Sydney artist Meg Minkley hopes to change the conversation about sexual violence, one drawing at a time. For Meg Minkley, drawing is as much spiritual lifeline as it is a form of self-expression. When this Sydney artist and illustrator was raped by a hostel owner while travelling in Mexico a […]
