Natalya Hughes: The Interior takes a close look at three of the artist’s recent bodies of work, including the acclaimed exhibition that gives the book its name. It’s a slim publication, at least compared to the run of hefty Australian monographs that have been appearing lately, but it’s a rewarding one, and the tight focus delivers a real sense of the rich detail in Hughes’ work.

The Interior was first presented at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2022 and is now on a lengthy national tour that will run through to 2026. It’s an ambitious exhibition, and fantastic proof of what can happen when artists are given the support to realise large-scale projects. (In this case, the Sheila Foundation’s $20,000 Fini Artist Fellowship.) Hughes used the opportunity to create an immersive consulting room, with curvy couches and soft furnishings that reference Freud and the history of psychoanalysis.

It would be easy for a monograph to get bogged down in detail, but art historian Susan Best has a playful solution. Her glossary quickly introduces some of Freud’s famous case histories and also outlines the key concept of the ‘part-object’ and the couch as a therapy tool. In The Interior, one of the couches is shaped like breasts, allowing the therapist and analysand to sit side by side. Others set up much stranger power dynamics. Best’s glossary is only brief, but it guides readers straight to the questions at the heart of the exhibition. What problems might be brought to couches like this? How could these problems be solved, and by whom? Could talking it out possibly change how our society thinks about women?

“I was also thinking about interior as that private, mostly inaccessible space of the subject,” the artist says in an interview here with the curator Elspeth Pitt. “And the interior of a woman… well, there has been much speculation about that. Freud’s description of women’s psychological interior as a ‘dark continent’ comes to mind.”

The interview covers a lot of ground but it’s more of an opening introduction than an in-depth exploration. Hughes also touches on the development of her interest in figuration, decoration and abstraction. Arguably this could have been given more space because there’s not a lot of discussion of her early work or how her life and interests have shaped her practice, but the focus of the publication is firmly on the recent work.

The fellowship that supported the exhibition is designed for women artists at critical junctures in their career. That feels like an apt description for Hughes. After twenty years of practice, the major touring exhibition and monograph solidifies a new level of recognition for the Brisbane-based artist. As Pitt notes in the interview, her work has often been described as decorative. “Historically, this has been a pejorative term, one tied to femininity,” she observes. “Yet it is a label you embrace.” Hughes clearly knows how it can be dangerous territory for artists but it remains one of her favourite critical tools. As she says, “I have a great deal of confidence in its ability to subvert other forms of communication.”

One of the most enjoyable parts of this monograph is how book designer Evi O draws out and highlights so many of these small decorative details and motifs. It’s easy to ‘zoom in’ in the gallery but that’s much harder in a book. The details add visual interest to the layouts but also build an unfolding sense of just how much there is to explore in Hughes’s practice.

Many of these motifs relate to Freud’s case histories. Best’s glossary introduces the key figures, including the patient ‘Dora’ who had recurring dreams of a burning house. The Interior works that dream into a tufted rug, placing Dora’s terrors into the domestic textures of daily life. Her complicated love interests Frau K and Herr K are also set into the fabric design for one of the couches. Their names form a repeating border, almost like an enclosing fence.

The two other bodies of work featured in Natalya Hughes: The Interior see Hughes reworking Willem de Kooning’s women and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s vulnerable child models Franzi and Marzella. In Hughes’s versions, the famous figures are familiar, but her heavy ornamentation and patterning makes them strange again, forcing the viewer to contest with them afresh. The essays by art historians Jacqueline Chlanda and Andrew McNamara draw out some of the conflicts in these works, and try to understand the roots of Hughes’ fascination with these figures.

As McNamara writes, Hughes’s recent practice contends with “the knotty questions of female representation” through modernist men. “It’s difficult to assign grandeur to an approach that explores the mess we leave behind,” he decides. “But this gives the work its vitality. It grapples with the tough challenges.” Hughes is tangled up in the legacies and histories she is critiquing. The monograph doesn’t flinch from that. There are no easy answers on offer here, but plenty of threads to pull.

Natalya Hughes: The Interior is published by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Design by EviO Studio. Edited by Tulleah Pearce.