Mining the Unconcious

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014, Pat Brassington expressed her strong desire to remain anonymous.¹Annabel Ross, “Quietly Unsettling: Pat Brassington Returns to Her Roots at Dark Mofo in Hobart,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 19, 2014 , accessed 1 August 2026 Even on the occasion of her thirty-year retrospective at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, titled À Rebours (a French expression used figuratively to mean ‘against the grain’ or ‘against nature’ and the name of a series of Brassington’s works from the 1980s), the Hobart-born-and-bred artist was characteristically tightlipped, keeping her answers short and bristling at any suggestion her work is ‘disturbing’. ‘That’s a label, I’ve been tagged with it, I think I’m becoming a little sick of it,’ she told the journalist at the time.

‘Tasmanian Gothic’ was much more to her liking, although they’re perhaps not the first words to come to mind when you see Brassington’s pigment prints Avid, 2004, and Unspecified procedures, 2005, which recently joined the NGV Collection as gifts of Susan Jones and James McGrath through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.

In Avid, long, black slippered feet appear beneath the palest of knees, the toes just barely visible. As in much of Brassington’s work, the print includes a splash of colour, in the form of the lushly textured fire-toned carpet on which the hare-like feet rest. In Unspecified procedures, a person floats neck-deep in the iciest of blue waters, bright-red lips parted on an otherwise obscured face, a fish tail breaking the surface behind them. Both hauntingly beautiful, the works deny us the satisfaction of an easy definition.

The artist rarely grants interviews and rarely speaks about the meaning behind her photomontages. Yet despite her reluctance to step into the limelight, Brassington has been repeatedly described as ‘one of Australia’s most significant and influential artists’.²Art Atrium 2026, Pat Brassington – Overview,< https://artatrium.com.au/pat-brassington >,accessed 2 August 2026 Descended from what she describes as ‘convict stock’, The artist grew up in Tasmania devouring the weird and wonderful stories of the island and not finding her way into the art world until her late thirties. Initially she wanted to be a painter, but the advent of digital photography in the 1980s spoke more their artistic sensibility.

Brassington’s photomontages are weird and wonderful. Each element – whether it be a fish’s tail (as in Unspecified procedures) or a vibrant bow in lieu of facial features (as in Rosa, 2014, purchased, NGV Foundation) – is designed to perfectly pique the viewer’s curiosity without rendering the work artificial or manipulated beyond recognition.

Brassington is careful not to exert too much control over her images; she embraces serendipitous mistakes and eschews perfectly polished finishes. She doesn’t always use a lens, but sometimes scans earlier negatives, discarded past works or other source material, experimenting in a style akin to, as she puts it, sketching or doodling.³ACCA, Pat Brassington: Á Rebours, interview at ACCA 2012, 11 August 2012, , accessed 13 August 2026. Her goal is never to veer into the realm of the grotesque. She wants her works to appear as seamless as possible. She uses digital inkjet prints precisely to blur the lines, so it’s almost impossible to tell what the artist has collaged in. You’re supposed to take a moment, take a beat, to realise what’s off about the image in front of you.

Like half-remembered dreams, Brassington’s works make you question not just what you’re seeing but what it is that’s hidden. What is simmering beneath the surface of Unspecified procedures? What happened to the top half of Avid’s sitter? The artist deliberately denies us the complete picture. She wants our imagination to run free and unconditioned. There are twelve of Brassington’s works in the NGV Collection. Many of their titles are puns, a wink and a nod to the images they feature. Certain themes recur frequently both in the works in the NGV Collection and more widely across the artist’s forty-year career. Bright-red lips are common, as are sensuously open mouths, thick, textured carpets and thin, freakishly elongated feet. There is fetishistic quality to many of Brassington’s works. She explores the unconscious and the conscious, the ego and our sense of self. She exploits the legacies of Surrealism, subverting the traditions of this male-dominated artistic movement and reapplying them with a feminist lens.

‘I aim to pitch my images just off the verge of normality, into those dense patches where the commonplace goes awry’ – Pat Brassington

Her use of colour is deliberate. In real life you will never see a body as pink as the one featured in House guest #1, 2007 (Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists). The colour is meant to unsettle you, to heighten your emotions. It’s a different form of manipulation, another layer of meaning for you to ponder.

The world that Brassington’s subjects inhabit is obscured, but it doesn’t appear to be particularly pleasant. At times, you feel like you’re seeing something best left behind closed doors. You are confused, if not repulsed, but you cannot look away. As Brassington explains: ‘I would say some of my imagery is downright ugly, but it has that delicate balance. It walks that fine line between something that’s beautiful and its antithesis. Beauty to one person is another person’s monstrosity.’⁴ibid

In Avid and Unspecified procedures, just as in all of Brassington’s work, the beauty is undeniable, but it’s also unexpected. It is beauty, but perhaps not as you would traditionally define it.

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Elisa Scarton is NGV Senior Editorial Coordinator.

The NGV warmly thanks Susan Jones and James McGrath for gifting Avid, 2004, and Unspecified procedures, 2005, to the NGV Collection through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.

Notes