Review, for ‘Glory Hole’ by WET Collective, 2025, Newport Substation
I salivate as I watch the well-attired glory hole attendant circle MEAT and hand me the paper slip. I’m instructed to pass the piece of paper through the hole. I obey.
The room is a small concrete space with a ceiling that rises above the level of the constructed wall, its size and atmosphere not unlike that of a brutalist public bathroom cubicle. I kneel down in front of the crude duct-taped hole on the kneeling cushion that reads “come”, and exchange my paper slip for a tzatziki-wet romano bean hanging limp from a manicured hand. A few waiting people watch me take it in my mouth.
I sit on a shared bench and wait for the bell and beckon that signifies I’m to be fed. I watch the others eat their beans, some yogurt dip falling on one guy’s crotch. He’s not ashamed, and neither am I to witness it, only a little charged by the connotation.
*The bell* a piece of pink cured fish on a coin of white bread accompanied by a shot glass of something that tastes like grapefruit juice.
The dual measure of anonymity and magnanimity is godlike. After all, Who giveth food to all flesh: for his mercy endureth for ever…
People laugh as they watch each other kneel before the hole. They archive the moment on their camera roll, immortalising images of their subjugated friends eating from misc forks, Chinese soup spoons, cut glass jiggers and fingertips.
I have decided I am the most vulnerable. I am here without friends to laugh at or witness me: eating cum-cathartic tragedy, reprieve between the collective comic feeding. The spectacle of my eating is the conceptual palate cleanser.
Like the only one in a gloryhole not getting fucked properly, I lose out on all the abject pleasure and adversity of exhibitionism for sympathy and basic inclusion.
*The bell* ground beef wrapped in a cabbage leaf (golabki in Polish, holubtsi in Ukrainian).
*The bell* congee with lap cheong.
*The bell* cutting of raw, grassy, hallucinogenic-sunrise-coloured capsicum.
*The bell* wonton wrapper with ginger and sweet steamed shrimp.
Each course is so patently made with love it corrupts the superficially mukbang-esque experience of its staging; its erotic edge blunted in place of something approaching hospitality proper, but more closely akin to care—without sacrifice of the carnal desire latent in hunger.
I think of Li-Young Lee’s poem Persimmons:
…How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart…
Mouthfuls administered with the tact of feeding a hungry but reluctant child, goading them with self-assurance to take it; and willingly reduced to children, we await instruction.
Time stalls with no windows to measure the day, compressing anonymous pleasure within the gastronomic fuck-and-suck of the Newport Substation.
*The bell* raspberry-capped finger.
*Taken between the teeth*
*The bell* Basque cheesecake and cut cherries.
*The bell* vodka shot with cracked black pepper.
I collect my empty vessels with grubby fingers and pass them back through the hole, making room to let the next person in to get their fill.
Review, Mass Memo, 2025, Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours), Monash Art, Design and Architecture
In a small antechamber; Francesca Havelock’s work, lucky charms and a tireless repetition (2025) catches me like a trick. Splitting off either side of the narrow room are a set of freestanding partition walls opposing each other and compressing the space. The walls display an algorithmic sequence of four-leaf clovers sharpened by negative space, a clear laminated seal creasing in veins across the surface. A marble sculpture lies on the floor, a double cornucopia coiling-in like an arthritic hand; while nearby a comically large horseshoe shackles a partition’s support.
Havelock’s work wryly stages the emblems of luck as both signs and simulacrums. Tokens of singular contingency are revealed, reproduced, and choreographed to the point of exhaustion. Each clover’s claim to uniqueness is overwritten by mechanical abundance. Yet a reflexive joy persists!—an involuntary quickening at the sight of so many emblems of “luck” amassed in one place. The piece suspends me happily within this contradiction, the clover’s symbolic aura is simultaneously nullified through repetition and then reanimated through sheer proliferation, as though affect continues to surge even after meaning has collapsed. Works like Havelock’s insist on a kind of sticky, speculative negotiation; the effect is to channel my attention toward the psychosocial.
Joseph Doggett-Williams’ sculpture Object Lesson (2025) delivers. A large birdhouse-like structure combines plywood, a drawer front, and a plastic extractor unit mottled with sawdust residue that suggests it was somehow instrumental in its own making, begging questions self-creation and inert, confused purpose. Circling it, I look down the glass top into its hollow body in search of withheld logic. Doggett-Williams’ Horse (2025) similarly complicates appraisal. A modern, muted yellow chair is adhered to the top of a decorative, antique wooden chair, both components discoloured and scuffed in states of tired, displaced labour. Like Object Lesson, Horse is constructed of superficially useful parts, yet in their assembly render the object functionless. Too practical to be exclusively playful, the collection of objects are spent by their beautiful, maximalist futility.
Contrary to Doggett–Williams’ debris chimeras, Janae Hunter executes a reciprocal gesture. The installation Ribs (2025) aggregates ten wooden bed slats placed equidistantly across the floor, the final lath slightly bowed. Two hung works at the end of the room, Pillows (2025), resolve the construction of an implied bed aligned in perfect feng shui. Striped jacquard sheeting is stretched across two pillowcase-sized wooden frames, straining taught over crude edges. A loose thread adheres to the side of one, while a smear of ochre-pink make-up blemishes the corner of the other. I want to be able to picture my foundation-dirty cheek lolling across the pillowcase, but this image is made strange by its slab-like geometry—the actual impression feels closer to the sensation of my face pressed up to the plate of a photocopier, the flesh of my cheek pooling against the glass.
Hunter surgically splays the bed, with the works reading like an index—or diagram, dissecting, naming, and invoking the absent body as the sum of its parts. An empty, discarded wine glass languishes on the windowsill, becoming a minor relic, while Ben Sendy-Smithers’ pre-recorded broadcast of Monash donors bleeds into the space—”…Muscular Dystrophy Australia…”—inciting further conceptual lethargy. Hunter includes a poem—another abstraction—meditating on breath and sleep, “rhythm” and “return”. Havelock’s “repetitions” lurch back at me in the scores of near-same wooden slats and analogous twin pillows with their neat planes of interminable stripes.
The “work”—as in labour, as in exertion—is a structural feature across these installations. Patently obscured within excess (Havelock); actual work secreted behind the aesthetics of labour (Doggett-Williams); as conceptual drill (Hunter). But the work is mine; my search; my upstaged cognition; my sleeping body. I bend towards rest, towards the comfort of a simple truth. It rejects my advances. Over and over.
Ekphrastic Poem After Three Turquoise-Glazed Shabtis
My heart breaks like faience—
vitrified and useless
while there are three dead
working somewhere in the afterlife.
Publicly degraded,
no known kin,
yet your face unwarlike
and closed in.
Nemes still so beautiful,
polished to a bead.
Are you lonely?
Mimicking body
cut from your twin—
I know Osiris will forgive you,
like all good gods do
History has eroded your call number
Its white hands grab at you still;
I can see them grabbing at you now—
Terminal Poem, ‘Reappraisal of Memory’ (2026) after Seamus Heaney’s ‘Relic of Memory ‘ (1969)
The saltbush leans silver after rain beside the inland waters
where fence posts sink slowly into Country that once fed wood:
scarred coolamons, carved trunks, smoke-blackened fishing posts
still surfacing through ploughed earth after the hard white years
that fenced the grasslands, measured distance, hardened their grain,
while homesteads rose over campsites, corrals over ghosts
whose names were rubbed from maps but remain in the red season.
Along the Murray, poisoned carp break the surface where the shallows lap
at beer cans, bones, shotgun shells, always the river’s give and take:
mission bells, ration flour, prayers repeated like constant ablutions,
and all through drought the land endured that drowning love
which taught men how to number cattle, tally water, hammer a stake
through ceremonial ground now hidden beneath a roadside stalagmite
of concrete silos. The mines bloom open-mouthed like dead lava,
their tailings glowing pale beneath satellites and the cooling star,
while trains drag iron ore westward past spinifex, saltpan, Coal and diamond
dreams sold overseas. Yet after fire, blackened grass gives sudden birth
to wattles bright as sparks blown outward from a burnt meteor
crossing a desert sky that I wasn’t meant to see. History is never simple,
though textbooks still arrange invasion into timelines without the lure
of grief, resistance, language surviving where the relic stored—
stone axes beneath museums, shell middens half-uncovered, a piece of stone
held in a child’s hand during an excursion from the shelf at school,
its surface warm as dry creek mud, ash-grey and oatmeal coloured.
Ekphrastic Poem after Clarice Beckett
Like a landscape painting
And also like reality
At some distance
Road fuses with sky
In form; or metaphor
To a vanishing strip
Or a void
Invisible seam
Promising nothing