ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS

Judith Wright: Asemic Writing: Vibration Sophie Gannon Gallery 2025 “Content resides on the dynamic between oppositional forces, strength and vulnerability, appearance and disappearance…” — Judith Wright Judith Wright’s art concerns, in her words, “the slippages of communication.” Wright’s new works for Asemic Writing: Vibration on paper and linen can be seen as three trios and one duet that explore related sensibilities. First, the trio of monochromatic silhouettes; second, the trio of symbolic and diagrammatic paintings; third, the trio of lyrical and avian forms in intense hues; and finally, the duet of intimate exchange between two people. The connecting thread throughout these groupings is Judith’s recent use of asemic writing as an anamorphic or sideways gesture towards the possibility of communication. Asemic writing literally has no semantic meaning; these are marks that allude to writing or characters yet settle in the “almost becoming” of language, where meaning is left to the ...

Catherine de Zegher, a prolific Belgian curator, lets a host of artists loose to tackle everything from eco;feminism to childbirth to torture in South America in an exhibition ‘A Women’s Work is Never Done’ at Richard Saltoun, London featuring Judith Wright. Review published in The Guardian, 22 Nov 2023. Read the review (PDF): Women’s Work Is Never Done review – decay, dildos and the disappeared enliven a great unravelling |

An essay by Catherine de Zegher. Contemplating the work of Judith Wright, unbidden, the work of Charlotte Salomon comes to my mind. Hence, the title of this essay is inspired by the title of Salomon’s major series of 769 gouaches: Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel [Life? or Theater?: A Song Play]. Why do I associate their works? It is neither about medium nor about form, neither about time nor about space, it is about the deep connection between art and life—an autobiography as oeuvre or a theater as survival. Download the full essay (PDF): Judith Wright Life or Theater Catherine de Zegher



MCA Collection Artist Studios: Judith Wright From her studio on Turrbal Country, artist Judith Wright talks about her practice and the process in creating her work, ‘Relative Conversations’ (2006), on display as part of ‘MCA Collection: Eight Artists’. Reproduced with permission of the MCA. Visit the MCA website for more information MCA group exhibition Eight Artists.

  Judith Wright is well-known for works spanning painting, drawing, video and installation, often sustaining dialogues between different media. She came to her art practice from a background in classical dance, having performed with the Australian Ballet for four years, a history revealed in the performative aspects of her work. Often dealing with the impermanence and the vulnerability of life, recently, Wright has drawn on her enduring themes in new ways, making videos and figurative sculptural installations. For ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, Wright has made A wake 2011. Her first major figurative installation, it marks a new development in her long meditation on the loss of her daughter, who died shortly after birth many years ago. Wright says ‘the power of the shadow to conjure absence’ directed her to make A wake. The ancient Greeks associated shadows with the soul, and this is true of Wright’s musicians: their shadows are the ...