CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Rebecca Hastings

Based in South Australia, Rebecca Hastings’ practice engages with themes of the posthuman condition, reflecting and drawing on both personal and collective existential anxieties. Adopting the conventions of figurative and still life painting genres, Hastings’ classically-rendered paintings merge uncanny and gothic tropes with the everyday to convey otherworldly, surreal narratives. Utilising visual qualities of Romanticism, hard-edge graphics and pop culture iconography heighten the temporal interplay that typifies Hastings’ work. These loaded yet obscure conflations enable the work to hover within a psychological mindscape – an invocation of the Uncanny Valley disturbingly poised between the real, and the unreal. Overall, Hastings' works acknowledge the inexpressible fears of our time, playing out as memento mori for our planet, our innocence, and our humanity.

'The pursuit of the uncanny, the strange and the unsettling persistently haunt Rebecca Hastings’ paintings. While previous work has revelled in contradiction through candy colours, juicy flesh and unflinching gazes, these recent paintings push and play with new depths of imagination. Hastings has created a world that hums within a stifling atmosphere of hands, fur, fabric and fakery. A palette of warm oxides and deep blue contain her subjects in a field, where it feels hard to draw breath. Through technical skill and command of her materials, she draws us down to where reality is slippery, and narrative elusive.'
Excerpt from essay by Mary-Jean Richardson, 2024

'In contrast to her previous work, which focussed on an internal exploration into maternal ambivalence, this latest body of work is more of an outward focus looking at the anxiety in relation to the state of the planet that our children will inherit. “My early practice was an inwardly focused rumination on maternal ambivalence,” she explains. “But as my children have grown I think of it more broadly as an investigation of the post-human condition, and our anxieties as humans entering a new way of being.'
Excerpt from text by Jane Llewllyn, 2020

Due Preparations
So here we are.
Staring down our fast-approaching future.
A world riven by our own hands.
Nature’s leavings. Scrappy reminders of complacency.
Let’s take only what we need. A little DNA, and some seeds.
A collection of vinyl from our youth.
Things to hold in our hand, and mind. Enough to start again.
1.5 degrees has come, and gone.
And on and on we scroll, faces bathed in blue-light.
Indolent flies stand by, mandibles working.
Rose-tinted lenses, fading to empty quicksilver.

Oubliette
The unseen, silently observes.
A liminal half-world plays host to a chimeral reckoning.
Childhood demons long tucked away, return unbidden, commingling with fears for my offspring.
Beauty, grotesquery, tenderness, and violence; this is your safe space.
An uncanny articulation of the inexpressible.
Secreted within a small place of forgetting.

ARTIST PROFILE:
Hastings graduated from Adelaide Central School of Art in 2011 with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours), and in 2017 received a Master of Visual Art (Research) from the University of South Australia (UniSA), supported by an Australian Post Graduate Award. Hastings has received Art SA Project grants and a UniSA Graduate Research Travel and Research Support Scholarship, enabling a research residency in Japan in 2017. She recently has undertaken an artist residency at the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2024.

Her work has been shortlisted for the BP Portrait Prize 2015 (National Portrait Gallery, London), and has been a finalist in a range of significant art prizes, including the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2021), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2012), the Sulman Prize (2014 and 2015), and the Archibald Prize (2014).