Julia McInerney

Villa Alba Museum

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.jpg
A book or stack of paper sits on a wooden floor, inside a room with a fading painting of an exterior scene, as if we are looking out from a balcony to water and hills..jpg
A window is open, outside is a leafy tree. Inside, in front of the window is a table, with landscape paper sheets arranged on top..jpg
A framed photo of a circular object is on the wall, hanging from nearly imperceptible wires. The mural painting covering the wall, faded, is of flowers and birds. A window is open to the left; it is bright outside..jpg
A small framed photograph hangs off the wires at a slight angle so that a shadow is cast on the mottled grey wall behind. The photograph is a black and white portrait of a person, taken from behind.jpg
From inside a room with a wooden floor, the camera frames an open window, a leafy garden outside. The room is dark, the outside is bright..jpg
Two framed photos of circular objects hang on the wall, mounted on nearly imperceptible wires. The mural painting covering the wall, faded, is of flowers and birds. .jpg

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.]

 
 

Joanna 
📍 Villa Alba Museum

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.

Image Description: An ornamental typeface Calantha shapes the words ‘Walking Through a Garden That Belongs To a House.’. The decorative flourishes of the letterforms recall the ornamentation on door handles at Villa Alba Museum. Typography designed by Jai Mudgerikar.

Audio production by Simon Maisch. Supported by SIAL Sound Studios, School of Design, RMIT University

The following text has been commissioned to reflect upon and respond to Julia McInerney, Joanna at Villa Alba Museum. The text is intended as a form of experimental wayfinding when engaging with the work.

  • Becky Beasley
    Walking through a garden that belongs to a house, and entering a house, for me, it’s always something very special to go from outside to inside; although it’s something that I think we all do a number of times a day without really thinking about it too much. You’ve spoken about the window in your own apartment that has been permanently sealed that’s been on your mind for the last three years; and now inside the Villa, thinking about those windows and the garden. Do you want to speak a little bit about your relationship with the windows of Villa Alba?

    Julia McInerney
    Yeah, I wondered what it might mean for the windows to open onto the elements outside, knowing the exhibition will take place in the wintertime. In a sense, the weather becomes another material in the space. And if it’s a cold day, and the windows are opened, one might question why, or what an opening is, or what does this particular window open onto?

    BB
    It’s also making me think of something wild, about allowing one to feel that sort of exposure and wildness in relation to an interior, particularly a sort of formal villa house where so much is opulent in its own fashion, relative to other kinds of humble dwellings, and that sort of emotional weather of human life. We also open windows to freshen up rooms, don’t we?

    JM
    We do. I love to open the windows when I’m home, in all kinds of weather. Perhaps because it took some amount of effort to pry open the window in my apartment, that one feels especially linked to my body. I’m thinking now of psychoanalysis, another interest of mine. In the process of opening up the sealed window, I was reflecting on how one opens oneself to another, creating a passage for something else to come in, but also to speak.

    BB
    Yeah, or stay silent.

    JM
    Yeah, the silence becomes optional rather than enforced from the outside.

    BB
    Silent or silenced … yeah. But also rolling back all the rugs. In these types of Victorian buildings, rugs are so important for keeping the drafts out, and in rolling all those rugs back, the undersides become exposed, also the floorboards themselves are also an opportunity for more drafts, aren’t they?

    JM
    Yeah, they suggest that its use as a house for living in has been put aside, showing instead something about its underlying structure. Rolling up the carpets and opening the windows re-animates the space, in a way. It could be in preparation for an exhibition, and extending that moment out, making it the exhibition itself.

    BB
    It’s in my mind because I’m sitting here in Hastings and it’s early Spring and early morning, whereas it’s late at night for you. As we’re talking about opening windows and rolling rugs back, what’s on my mind, as the sunlight’s coming in on a spring morning, is spring cleaning.

    I’ve lived in a lot of Victorian buildings here in the UK, I’m sitting in one now in fact, and one of the things I learnt was that they’re built to breathe. We get some cracks but generally that’s just to do with how the building is moving. I’m thinking about where there are no curtains and the rugs are rolled back, there’s a sort of exposure.

    JM
    Yeah, there’s so much that we can’t ordinarily see when we dwell inside a home, and there is a kind of exposure at play through these gestures. Perhaps this is linked to how a roll of film is exposed to light when the shutter of a camera opens, creating a passage between outside and inside. When you were talking of these reversals, and of being on opposite sides of the world, I thought of the darkroom, too, where there are these reversals from negative to positive. I’ve also been thinking about the different kinds of rotations that occur throughout the show, and how they might reflect a rotation from object to subject. I'm thinking here of a moment in the film where Joanna turns around, gazes directly at the camera, and smiles.

  • Visit in the company of another. Stand together close to a window, listening. Stand together close to a photographic image. Ask: what do you see in this image, and what do you not see?

  • Julia McInerney is an artist based in Naarm Melbourne. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Fine Art at Monash University. Her work runs across a range of registers, both physical and symbolic, whose correspondence allows for meaning to be transmitted between them. Recent exhibitions include The Garden at ACE Open; Archipelago, Greenaway Art Gallery; Guirguis New Art Prize 2017, Post Office Gallery Ballarat; and 2016 TarraWarra Biennial: Endless Circulation, TarraWarra Museum of Art.

    In 2015, she was an artist in residence at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin; and Artspace, Sydney. McInerney is represented by Greenaway

  • Becky Beasley is an artist who lives and works in Hastings, England. Beasley produces objects, photographs and texts which are typically informed by a deep engagement with literature. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions, at venues including 80WSE Gallery (NYU), New York; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; South London Gallery, London; Leeds City Gallery, Leeds; Spike Island, Bristol; Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London; Tate Britain, London; Stanley Picker Gallery, London; Whitworth, Manchester; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunstverein Freiburg; Kunstverein Munich; Kunsthalle Bern. She received a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2018 and is represented internationally by Francesca Minini Gallery, Milan, and Gallery Plan B, Berlin.

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