In 2011, Rebecca Hastings an Adelalaide hills-based painter graduated from the Adelaide Central School of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) and then won the Helpmann Academy’s SALA Award in 2012 at the Graduates Exhibition, along with being the annual winner of the Pleysier Perkins Emerging Art Prize in conjunction with FLG’s Exploration 12 exhibition. To further add to her recent successes of 2012, her Offering series (which featured the Rabbit Boy painting on the cover of The Adelaide Review) was exhibited in Melbourne at the Flinders Lane Gallery and sold out. Hastings second part of the Offering series will be exhibited as part of SALA Festival at the Hotel Metropolitan. Hastings claims the theme for both series, was something she wrestled with and resisted during art school.
“I worried about making sentimental pictures of my kids and found myself overcompensating, making works that were quite harsh, focusing on all the negative things about motherhood but not the positives,” Hastings explains. “Fortunately I did manage to get those works out of my system and I found myself dipping into the complex and often contradictory experiences and emotions that come with having kids. Anger, frustration, tenderness, humour and fear; all of these things feed into the work somehow, and I enjoy the multiple layers that are possible in taking this approach….” This series is “psychologically” charged and explores the weighty topic of maternal ambivalence, defying the usual sentimental or romantic ideal one generally associates with motherhood and thus challenges the traditional image the viewer expects to see of mother and child. As an artist, Hastings registers the various complexities and contradictions of being a mother, where emotions can run riot and oscillate between ambivalence, affection and aggression.
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| Bird Boy, Rebecca Hastings 2012, oil on board, 40cm X 40cm |
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| Wolf Boy, Rebecca Hastings 2012, oil on board, 40cm X 40cm |
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| Rabbit Boy, Rebecca Hastings 2012, oil on board, 40cm X 40cm |
The continuing theme of maternal ambivalence will feature her 3 year old daughter, whereas the first series featured her 6 year old Boy in the paintings, highlight in various animal costumes. Hastings will not exhibit Rabbit Boy at the Hotel Metropolitan, but rather her new work which will be based on her relationship that she has with her three-year-old daughter. “There are some new ideas in these works because the relationship I have with her is different to my relationship with my son. In this exhibition there are paintings of her empty clothing. These are baby’s clothes that she has grown out of but which are presented as still life objects. But whilst the clothes are empty, they still speak of the presence of her body. For me, these are memento mori, reminders of her as a baby, but a baby that no longer exists. They are about this odd sense of grief or loss that I feel each time the kids grow into their next phase of development.”
Regardless of whether we are examining the Offering series 1 or 2 there is a strong narrative element and clear aspects of the child at play, which may come in the form of hiding, of dressing up or pretending to be something else. The images beckon us into an disturbing and perhaps not-so make-believe world, where the child is portrayed as a strange concoction of being somewhat bizarre, other-worldly, confrontational and playful all at the same time. Hastings uses classical painting techniques to create these extremely realistic and highly realised glimpses into a private world, lingering somewhere between reality and imagination, where she toys with the seen and unseen, the moments or spaces in-between. There is a common thread across all of the works with the consistent use of colour palette, along with the intense lighting that is used to create drama by highlighting the meticulous details and suggesting the unknown with dark shadows. These mesmerizing images prove to conceal and reveal at the same time creating feelings of unease that undoubtedly capture the viewers attention.
Hastings is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery and will return to the Melbourne gallery for a solo exhibition next year and will exhibit locally at Hill Smith Gallery at the end of 2013.
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