Natalya Hughes / Australia b.1977 / Looking cute 2013 / Synthetic polymer paint on marine ply / The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris AM through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2018. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Natalya Hughes

Natalya Hughes
Looking cute 2013

Not Currently on Display

In Looking cute 2013, Natalya Hughes interprets the work Looking cute: the appearance of a housewife in the tenth year of Meiji (1877) 1888, from the famous series ‘Thirty-two aspects of customs and manners’, by Japanese master printmaker Tsukioka (Taiso) Yoshitoshi (1839–92). Yoshitoshi’s career spanned the late years of the Edo period and into the early years of the Meiji. He is known for his stylistic and subject innovations which were enhanced by an extraordinary technical prowess. In Yoshitoshi’s original woodcut the housewife, presumably also mother, holds a baby close as it searches her face with both hands and eyes.

In Hughes’s version, these elements have been reconfigured using the image manipulation software Photoshop to construct an ambiguous, yet symmetrical, abstraction. The resulting remix is then painted out by hand.1 Hughes largely discards Yoshitoshi’s figures, focusing instead on the rich patterns and shapes of their clothing. Only obtuse clues to their ghosted bodies remain in the fall of cloth — clues which are further buried in a suggestive, yet thinly described, new body.

In fact, Hughes’s embrace of symmetry recalls that found in nature — the body, most overtly in genitalia, as well as the decorative clichés of birds, butterflies and flowers. Hughes’s dynamic teal flower background design is taken from the baby’s clothes in Yoshitoshi’s composition, while the larger hovering stripped blue form is taken from the mother’s sleeve. Trims and sashes provide extra flourish and dynamism to the composition.

Endnotes:

1. Victoria Lynn, ‘TarraWarra Biennial 2006’, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Tarrawarra, 2006, p.8.

Natalya Hughes’s paintings, textiles and installations playfully critique the representation of women in modernist painting. Her use of form and pattern draws attention to the role that women’s bodies play in the rhetoric of modernism that often marginalises the decorative and silences the reality of individual women’s bodies and experiences.

Hughes  is an established mid-career artist who is best known as a painter, though she has also applied her distinctive approach to image making to digital animations, as well as installations comprised of custom wallpaper, upholstered furniture, and carpets. Pursuing an interest in the aesthetics of decadence and the feminine, Hughes has built a practice around the sampling and reworking of both Eastern and Western art history references since 2002. The result is part Pop, part Op.

Currently lecturing in art history at the Queensland College of Art, Natalya Hughes graduated from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, in 2001 with Honours in Fine Arts and was awarded a PhD at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW in 2009.