Review: Venus on the Half-Shell entwines brutal beauty with Polly Pocket pretty

Curated by Andy Kelly, featuring work from Caitlin Shearer, Kate Rhode, Eryca Green and Ella Saddington

Venus on the Half-Shell from Andy Kelly, curator and owner of Oigåll Projects, is a return to form. Entwining brutal beauty with Polly Pocket pretty, Oigåll presents female led work with themes of fertility, appearance and connection. 

Oigåll Projects is “an independent showroom and gallery space…offering artists and designers a space to exhibit experimental design, artwork and objects in a non-commercial setting.” 

Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. There’s art in this street on Wurundjeri Land, art in tradition and gentrification. Before I get to the gallery, I sift through thick linen dresses and quietly put them back in soft shock after I read their three hundred dollar price tag. I watch soy latte sippers chat in sage green cafes. I see glitter and silk peeking out the windows of epochal, stalwart stores Ms Edgley and Rose Chong Costumes. There’s art in the alleyways, threading along rooftops, a curved bust carved into the lintel here, brand new graffiti, silver and sparkling, there. A mother, chic in silver bracelets, scoops up her daughter who is waving to someone through the window of a gallery of painted white brick. This is Oigåll Projects.

It’s the opening night of Venus on the Half-Shell. Jewel blue attendees spill out onto the street, reading the exhibition statement across white brick corners, fine paper thin: 

Do you remember being born?

Are you thankful?

For the hips that cracked…

…the deep velvet of your mother…

…and her mother…

…and her mother?

- Warsan Shire

The gallery is womb like, and warm. Inside, red lights glow over my head, and rain slides down windows. The first room is full of pastel work from painter Caitlin Shearer and sculptor Kate Rhode. Inspiration for the curation threads through both works clearly:
The Birth Of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. The goddess of sex and fertility, emerging from a dark sea on a pastel wonder sky, Venus is naked, fully grown, covering a breast, water lapping at her shell. Shearer’s pale pink paintings of cherubic babies, long lines of the female form, cockle shells, pearl scallop shells, repeated over and over, draw the eye. The paintings are perfectly curated with Rhode’s sculptured coral, dripping in spray paint. Two blue fish, their open gold tipped lips wrapped around candlesticks form an intricate and covet worthy candle holder. A functioning glass table is held up by an enormous mother octopus, her arms curling, suction cupped, painted pale purple. The work is earnest, cheeky, playful. Andy Kelly is centre stage, a bright presence, championing his artists as a crowd circles around him. Between new guests arriving, I ask him about this childlike room we stand in.

“Well, the lexicon of art can be very contentious” says Kelly,  “and I wanted to do something fun and colourful, Polly Pocket, threading into meaning and brutality, specifically the idea of motherhood.”

Oigåll’s second room is dimmer, darker. Eryca Green’s photography work is gorgeous in its can’t-look-away brutality. Capturing the process of her double vasectomy is a photograph, detailed and rich as an oil painting, of Green in a pale yellow skirt that clings to her hips. Yellow tulips rest against her bandaged breasts, her own blood stemming through two rubber tubes into two bags cupped in her hands. Green tells me she carried the bags for a week, her blood slowly leaking out of her. Her body is genderless, especially when her head is wrapped in a cloud of gauze that curls upwards in the wind. She does not aim to challenge, allowing the viewer the privacy to stare as much as they wish.

Gazing upon Eryca’s work, my breasts, a little swollen from the start of a period and from the conscious choice to no longer wear a bra, hurt. My heart hurts. Yet I could stare for hours; the beauty, the solemn stillness. Just like Venus, Green’s body is delicate. 

Designer Ella Saddington of Cordon Salon has created two contrasting offerings in the reflected light of Oigåll’s third room. Faux maroon marble plinths on one wall, blue stained glass mirrors on the other. Gallery attendees are particularly entranced by the mirrors, a collaboration between Saddington and a stained glass window maker. She explains the blue blooming through the mirror is a technique; a light leak from a flaw in a camera, fused onto the glass. “It’s a conscious choice” she tells me, “there’s something wonderful in decoration, something you can use, and also admire as art.” I agree, each piece from Saddington would be a jewel for a collector, never replicated. Each piece devoted with time and crafted labor, I can see this ardent dedication in a faux marble vessel through which I imagine Venus washing her face, her rich long red hair. Again, I can’t not think of the flow of water, connecting birth, beauty, and fertility. 

On the drive home, I turn on the radio. A heavy piano, plucked through with harp and the upward curve of a lilting violin, lifts the hairs on my arms. Eora artist Lara Jean sings:

I’ve got too much to do, too much to prove, there’s a child in me, who wanted to be the star of the score. Heaven! Baby, tell me what I’ve got. 

Artwork by Caitlin Shearer.