Julia McInerney

Feature image description: A small framed photograph is mounted on a mottled grey wall, bathed in light from a window on a wall to the right. The window is open. A fragment of a decorative fireplace interrupts the lower right corner of the image. The wooden floor is the soft, burnt brown of caramel. [Other image descriptions embedded in alt text.]

And when I say ‘women’ I mean nothing like an arcane suppleness or a forged memory of plenty. I’m painting the place in the polis of the sour heat and the pulse beneath our coats, the specific entry of our exhalations and words into the atmosphere. And when we pass each reflective surface, glimpsing our passage among sibylline products, what are we then if not smeared stars, close to it, close to what happens; the sequin, the syllable, the severance. 

­— Lisa Robertson

Julia McInerney’s new installation Joanna (2022) includes photographs, sculpture, and film, and unfolds in several rooms of the Villa Alba Museum. An exploration of artistic practice as a series of reparative acts, the installation is inspired by the often unrecorded or invisible work of women, as well as its domestic setting. An Italianate mansion overlooking Studley Park in Kew, Villa Alba was built in the 19th century as a private family home, and decorated by the Paterson brothers with an abundance of floral ornamentation and murals, including an extraordinary room in which Edinburgh faces Sydney. In the postwar period, the house became a dormitory for nurses – another undervalued and often invisible care worker – working at the Royal Women’s Hospital, and many of the patterned walls were painted a clinical white. 

The work is titled for the artist’s mother, Joanna. With restraint and sensitivity to the building itself, McInerney places a series of artworks that become partial glimpses of her mother, a way to ‘circle her absence through fragments’, the artist explains. While the title names its protagonist clearly, the installation is more elliptical and oblique. It is an exploration of what it means to attempt, in a prismatic and partial way, to know someone, or to bring them into view. A beginning of sorts is in the Villa Alba’s ornate front drawing room, in which appears a small photograph, printed the size of a palm, and titled Winter Garden Photograph (2020), in homage to Roland Barthes’ discussion of a photograph of his mother – never reproduced – in his deeply felt treatise on photography, Camera Lucida. We see Joanna from behind, as she attempts to repair an arrangement of camellias by placing the fallen blooms back on their stems. The camellia recurs throughout the installation, in photographic and sculptural form. It refers to Joanna’s reparative act as well as to McInerney’s ongoing investigation into Ina Higgins, Melbourne’s first female landscape architect. Most of the gardens planted by Higgins no longer exist, and McInerney is in the process of propagating some of the camellias that she once grew. Photographs of camellias or their seeds appear sporadically throughout the house, all in black-and-white, occupying an aesthetic register distinct from the warm, muted floral tones of the home’s own decorative scheme. 

McInerney, a sculptor as well as a photographer and filmmaker, has made slight sculptural interventions onto the house itself. She has rolled up the carpet in the dining room, to expose the wooden floor beneath while hiding the carpet from view. She has also opened some windows in the house to the winter air, as if allowing the house to breathe, or to exist in a bare state, unornamented. McInerney is interested in capturing what she calls the ‘non-performance’ of the house, and of her mother. The heart of the installation is a film, also titled Joanna, playing in an upstairs bedroom. We hear Joanna before we see her playing a piece of music by Felix Mendelssohn. The film, however, is dedicated to Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s sister, and the piece of music Joanna plays is now thought to be inspired or even authored by Fanny, who was told that music could be an ornament in her life, but nothing more. McInerney’s installation provides a counterpoint to the home’s ornamentation, and the way in which that quality was historically associated with the feminine, and the superfluous. —­­TM

References

Lisa Robertson, “Seventh Walk,” in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Astoria: Clear Cut Press, 2003), 268.

Conversation with the author, 1 April 2022.