The ‘settler’ and the unheimlich

I didn’t much like reading Freud. For a modern woman, a city girl, sexually comfortable and emotionally astute, a philosophy syllabus that persisted with Sigmund Freud’s essays on psychoanalysis, felt lazy, musty, oh so very masculine.

Maybe even patriarchal, paternal, misogynistic; definitely phallocentric, anthropocentric, colonising, categorising. Characteristics that allude to a lack of confidence in our ability to coexist with ourselves and our natural environment; characteristics that lead to a need for ‘mastery’.

While some of this mastery has been magnificent (the clock, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Netherlands), there is much we could critique, at which we could poke fun, and Maddison Kitching’s recent collection of paintings en plein air, does both.

Kitching, a keen researcher, did not find himself in the Australian bush, unprepared, as early ‘explorers’ and settlers might have. His good sense stems from a long-time interest in Australiana, a close reading of critical colonial texts, and a pragmatic competency in navigating the outback. In his new series, Here, there, everywhere, he draws attention to Australia’s animals – not the wild or even live type, but those that, by way of our collective psyche, have been captured, contained and manipulated to meet our needs.

When Kitching first showed me the second work in the series: Taz and Benjamin at Wilson’s Prom, Freud surprisingly loomed into view. I felt compelled to use the word ‘grotesque’ as my spine twisted with discomfort. But grotesque is a word one must deploy with care around an artist. ‘Brilliantly grotesque’ I said, as I took pleasure in the ghoulish composition and garish colours on display.

*Taz and Benjamin at Wilson’s Prom*, Maddison Kitching, 2021, Oil and acrylic paint on ply wood, 45 x 55cm

Rough brushstrokes of blood-orange and a cerulean green skyline – the kind of wrong colours the world turns when it’s ablaze. A creature – warped, cartoonish – haunting the foreground; a memento mori, the devil itself descending? It felt that Freud’s unheimlich (literally, unhomely, or ‘uncanny’) was there on the canvas and here in my body, and I found myself searching google for the long-forgotten essay, to revisit Freud’s diagnosis of the phenomenon.

Read alongside Kitching’s research, a thread begins to appear.

“The ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”

–Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 1919

“When animals die out, the cultural and ecological relationships that furnish their existence can be experienced as a kind of non-stop haunting.”

–Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms, 2020

“Within imperialism you have a constant nostalgia for the thing that you’re in the act of destroying. So at the same time as you disrupt local cultures and seek to in fact destroy them – often in order to dominate – you are mourning the loss of those cultures, and try to act in ways to preserve them.”

–Sarah Cheang, Stuff the British Stole, ep 3, 2020

In 1773 an illustrated kangaroo appeared in Hawkesworth’s journal of Captain Cook’s First Voyage. In 1954 the Tasmanian devil, ‘Taz’, made its first Looney Tunes cartoon appearance in the United States. In 1984 Mitsubishi engaged the frill neck lizard to represent its early model Mirage in TV advertisements. These animals, and their likenesses, have been extracted from their native environment and over time, reproduced so often that they have become broadly symbolic of ‘Australia’ and an ‘Australian’ identity. So much so, their commercial representations can feel more familiar than the animals themselves.

Think koala.

And I don’t know about you, but at first, I can’t help but think of Blinky Bill or Caramello: cute, smiling, serving; then perhaps the bush behind the Great Ocean Road, where the eucalypt-grey marsupials sleep, screech, squawk, claw; next, Parliamentarians doing much the same, over logging and numbers and climate – koalas for the most part an inconvenience for politicians – until such time as diplomacy requires a soft, fluffy, cuddly experience, dissimulation in full effect.

While Freud’s essay Das Unheimlich is given the title ‘The Uncanny’ in its English version, the text taps an alternate translation: heimlich – homely, unheimlich – unhomely, in its ongoing exploration of “this quality of feeling” that “excites dread”. Kitching’s examination of the way settler-Australians have extracted native animals from their natural habitat, distilling them into symbols and incorporating them into daily life in fashion, stained glass, ornaments, and postcards to stick on the fridge, similarly dissects a distorted sense of connection and relationship with place. Such supposed reverence of these native animals is particularly curious given the simultaneous destruction of the environment necessary to sustain them.

A platypus selling ‘vermin destroyer’, the Kookaburra ‘Ghost’ Pro cricket bat made from a felled tree, kangaroo ‘leathers’, and the now-extinct thylacine promoting the Tasmanian state government, all demonstrate how easily our attempts to create a sense of homeliness can be skewered by feelings of unheimlichkeit – a knowing that our increasingly isolated experience of Australian animals as mascots on packaging, screens and billboards, is no kind of knowing at all.

In Here, there, everywhere, Kitching invokes the uncanny, placing abstracted animal forms from recognisable logos and other emblems of popular culture, into a new interpretation of its sentient “double’s” natural setting. Lurid neon hues replace the muted colours of early landscape painting and the slips in the surface make it hard to find stable footing.

*Here, There, Everywhere*, Maddison Kitching, Kings ARI 2022, Installation view (Aaron Claringbold)

The unsettling feeling of viewing Kitching’s distilled and corrupted visual plane is suggestive of what Freud calls a “disturbance in the ego” – a feeling that every Australian settler would be wise to tune into, for our adopted home needs us to feel compelled to act for its environmental protection, now more than ever.

Catalogue text by Amy Rudder for Here, There, Everywhere, a solo show from Melbourne artist, Maddison Kitching, at Kings ARI, 3–26 February, 2022. Download the show catalogue.

Freud in the outback

The flaw