Desire, Vulnerability, Approach:

The Work of Judith Wright

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Slowness: the slow time that we need to approach, to let everything approach, life, death, time, the thing; all the slowness of time that life must take in order to give itself without hurting us too much, all the time we must put in to reach the thing, the other, to attain it without hurrying it, to come close to it.

Hélène Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, 1991: 62

Judith Wright: Desire’ comprises works made by the artist between 2003 and 2014: Seven Stages of Desire (2003–2010), A Journey (2011–2012), Destination (2013), Through a Glass, Darkly (2013), and The Ancestors (2014). Moving simultaneously across time and media, the works engage video, drawing, sculpture, painting, and installation. As such, it is initially daunting to speak of them in any coherent fashion. One is pulled in multiple directions, set adrift without a compass to mark one’s way. And yet, this drifting is paradoxically what draws the works together—what lends them their power and their potency. Wright’s works are remarkable; and one way to explore why this is so is to suggest that they each, in their own way, carry out the intimate and slow work of the approach. Whether in the minimal and deeply haunting movements of One Dances or Between (in Seven Stages of Desire), or the darkly baroque phantasies of A Journey and The Ancestors, the works traverse the infinite space of vulnerability the self encounters on its journeys of transformation.

Wright’s preoccupations from 2003 to 2014 encompass love, fragility, loss, and grief, and the vulnerability that binds these states lends her work a strongly visceral quality. Gesture and touch emanate from the moving... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Between from ‘Seven stages of desire’, 2007. Single channel video, 8 minutes, colour, stereo sound. Actors: Janet Vernon and Graeme Murphy, voice: Deborah Kayser, camera: Robert Humphreys, composer: Liza Lim. Courtesy the artist.

‘Judith Wright: Desire’. Installation view, QUT Art Museum, 2014-2015. Photograph Carl Warner. Courtesy the artist.