Julia Trybala centres her work on people and relationships, drawing inspiration from personal experience and conversations with friends and family.

In this vein, Hold a body together explores the links between grief, routine and ritual, the body and ecology, labour and ties to the mother. The works in this exhibition were made in response to the artist’s friend Chelsea Hart’s (unpublished) book of poetry Petal, written while processing the sudden passing of her mother. In the introduction, Hart writes: “This little book contains lessons and understandings that emerged for me in grief - of the body and its entanglements, the way it responds, moves and is altered when someone leaves the earth.”

Female intimacy, touch and affection are themes that run throughout Trybala’s practice. In her new works, ritual, reverence, memory and desire also come into play. The paintings contain imagery of hands, feet, ears, breasts and bellies; bodies that are entangled, holding, hugging, caressing, nurturing and clinging to each other. Bringing to mind the wild beauty of Georgia O’Keeffe’s mountain ranges and sculpted floral forms, the paint, luscious like velvet and soft like terracotta clay, slowly flows across the canvas, longing for affection.

The politics of the feminine body in space is central to Trybala’s work. In her carefully composed paintings, closely cropped, ambiguous body parts are entangled across the canvas; fleshy female planes contort and push to the edge of the canvas. Trybala’s moody paintings investigate the politics of taking up space: what it means to paint a woman so dominant she must be folded into the canvas, contorted to fit within the frame.