Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution
Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution (2022) is a visceral vision of colonial power—an exposed white woman gives birth, not to a child but to the dome of the State Library of Victoria. Encircled by cold-eyed onlookers, she embodies both subjugation and complicity, raising urgent questions about the institutions we inherit.
Although at first hard to descry, at the centre of this painting—and dominating its immense, four-metre-wide composition—is a naked white woman with only the slightest hints of pink on her heels, toes, elbows, and fingertips. She is on all fours: her face buried in her crossed forearms; her breasts pendulous with gravity. She is giving birth, and the scene captured is the dramatic moment of the infant crowning. Emerging out of the woman’s engorged vagina, surrounded by neat rows of pubic hair, however, is not a child’s blood-encrusted head, but the iconic glass dome of the La Trobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria (SLV).
Related
Before pop, before Warhol, before Hamilton—there was Donald Duck. In a wartime outpost in Papua, Charles Bush painted an eerily prescient vision of mass media’s encroachment. A symptom, not an agent, of pop’s first age, Bush’s work sits uneasily in art history’s timeline.
Edie Duffy’s photorealism doesn’t just document—it distorts. Mining eBay’s throwaway images, she renders objects with a fixation that turns the banal into the surreal, collapsing nostalgia, obsolescence, and digital-age vertigo into a vision both unsettling and precise.
