Object relations: I want to break free
By Kyla McFarlane
Download catalogue (344k)

In the struggle of our daily existence, the home can be our comfort or our cage. In Lily Hibberd’s recent series of paintings I want to break free, our domestic surroundings are figured as a precarious, even dangerous realm. Hibberd’s subjects tussle with the trappings of their domestic environment as if their life depends on it and, in some cases, the effect is catastrophic.


Behind closed doors, 2006, Pegasus print

Hibberd is an artist who has always held a fascination for film. And, in many ways, these small dramatic scenes allude to filmic genres. The shower scene in Psycho, the domestic obsessions in American Beauty, a half-remembered scene from Ghostbusters and a myriad of teen slasher films sit somewhere in the latent, collective memory of these works. And Hibberd prompts us to think cinematically, providing us with an establishing shot of a house photographed at night. Here, the orange glow emitting from its windows in a dark, empty street scattered with dead leaves suggests the home as a sinister, rather than comforting, realm. However, these paintings are not simply scenes from an unmade film of suburban lives. Solid skeins of paint leak across the picture plane from the edge of each large canvas, acting as a kind of theatrical curtain that simultaneously reveals and entraps each scene. This rupturing of painted space reminds us that these scenes exist in the field of representation and are therefore subject to its limitations and tropes. Hibberd’s subjects are trapped, not only in the four walls of the home, but also by the bounds of their representational framework. The paintings are also the final link in a complex representational chain developed by the artist in the course of making the work. Beginning with written fragments, Hibberd then stages each scene photographically before moving to the final painted work. This merging of mediums has an uncanny effect, as each painting retains residues of this process, holding fragments of narrative together with the simulacral effect of the photograph. The result is a tangle of references from representation’s vast domain, as traces of each medium are merged with urban mythologies and the singularity of any one of our personal histories blends with the collective unconscious of our cultural realm.


Security screen & Slip up, oil & pencil on linen, 2006

Although the paintings in I want to break free convey a sense of drama and intrigue, their single-shot partiality refuses us the pleasure of the dramatic denouement. The ‘knot’ of narrative suspense is not unravelled, and the luxury of cause and effect is not revealed by the paintings themselves. The subjects, whilst depicted in a climatic moment, are caught in cyclical narratives of repetition and compulsion, from which they seem unable to break free. Take, for example, the habitual wrestle with the doona cover in Clean sheets, or the woman standing at the screen door to watch the sunset in Security screen. Both these moments emerge from the smallest of recurring interior narratives, borne from frustration and anxiety, or boredom, or shame. Entangled in the bedclothes, or unable to move beyond the back door, Hibberd’s painted subjects provoke in us an existential insight: perhaps this is as good as life gets. These are small stories of discomfort and claustrophobia, but their re-presentation as painted scenes throws the poignancy and pathos of each scenario into sharp relief.

Light pervades these paintings, but they are infused with a dark humour. In Garden variety, Hibberd depicts a suburban Laocoon struggling not with a serpent, but his garden hose. The backyard scenario is at once courageous and absurd, as Hibberd replaces mythological heroics with a situation that is ‘garden variety’ in its ordinariness - the struggle against an overgrown garden and a wayward, writhing hose. If Laocoon and his sons exemplified a dignified suffering, Hibberd’s backyard Laocoon struggles against the indignity of the banal. It’s a battle played out in each of these paintings, and one that is often lost to the domestic object. In Super cycle, a woman is alarmingly impaled on a poorly-positioned knife in the dishwasher, whilst Slip up features a man facing the ignominy of self-injury in the bathroom, his head cracked on the toilet seat after slipping in the shower stall. For Hibberd, the dangers of the ordinary clearly lurk in every corner of the house.


Garden variety, 2006, oil & pencil on linen

A suite of smaller paintings in the series continues to unravel the psychological intensity of these object relations. For instance, an isolated yellow rubber glove, set in a pink colour field, is attended by the text ‘every time I think of you I cry’… In these works, the most insignificant of household objects become containers of meaning – receptacles for anxieties, desires and imaginings. Against the larger dramatic paintings, these objects appear uncanny and their partial, often despondent, texts allude to universal human sentiments and the torpor of the daily domestic grind in the absence of more meaningful pursuits. And yet the works in I want to break free refuse any such assurances of reality, wrestling as they do in an irresolute dialogue between fiction and documentary, illusion and reality. Deep in the cycle of endless repeat, however, Hibberd reveals a modicum of hope, where in one image, beneath a glowing doorbell, the words ‘for the last time’ offer the small possibility that maybe, just maybe, the cycle of existential entrapment might be broken.


Domestic bliss, 2006, oil & pencil on linen

Dr Kyla McFarlane is Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at Monash University Museum of Art, Clayton Victoria