Uncanny is an exhibition in collaboration with Elizabeth Rankin at Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Sydney.

Kirsten Drewes’ soft sculpture aims to unsettle viewers by creating ambivalent tensions between meta-themes such as sex and death, mobilising unresolvable tensions between the desirable and the abject body. By deliberately depicting intimate parts of the body and emphasising sexual connotations through combinations of shapes, colours and surfaces, Kirsten strives to represent personal conflicting feelings related to an erotic, attractive body image confronted with associations to failure and ageing. Her choice of private themes, which are rooted in highly personal narratives, aims for an emotional connection with the viewers’ memories. However, as eroticised, violated doubles of the viewers’ selves, these bodies might also appear uncanny or abject and excavate repressed sexual feelings from the unconscious. By using abstracted bodily forms and soft materials and being a woman artist, Kirsten translates highly personal and complex experiences into artistic forms that push back against familiar cultural forms, representational categorisations, and normative readings concerning traditionally defined gender roles such as stereotypes of femininity.

Photos by Corey Rankin