Title

Barbara Hanrahan 1939-91; Wedding night 1977.

Author

Dixon, Christine.

Source

Gray, Anne (ed.), Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2002

Details

page 314.

Publication date

2002

Type

Essay/article

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Wedding night, by Barbara Hanrahan.

Barbara Hanrahan’s subject is the uneasiness of marriage, the personal and social expectations and fantasies it produces, and the gap between these fantasies and reality. The couple, so newly united, are separated and alone in their conjugal bed, despite the decorative flowered pillows and borders. Their flesh consists of pink bricks, perhaps a symbol of the suburban house in which they seem likely to live, or of the barrier between them.

Barbara Hanrahan, printmaker and novelist, made three versions of her image Wedding night between 1964 and 1977, reusing the elements to different effect. The first is an etching printed in red and black, the second a linocut and the third variation is a colour screenprint. All three share the same simple compositional elements, an overhead view of two naked figures in a divided bed, with the title ‘Wedding night’ above and the labels ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ below them. In the 1977 screenprint, the wife’s torso is also branded with the word ‘virgin’. In this version, Hanrahan also added underwear to the figures, but she subverted the concealing quality of the underpants by the addition of bright yellow pubic hair, which frames the genitals and draws attention to the sexual activity to come.

By the late 1970s, the assumption that girls would be virgins on their wedding night had largely disappeared from Australian society. Hanrahan’s crudely outlined figures, labelled for our inspection, seem to recall a past age of conformism and sexual ignorance. The universal theme of alienation, the essential unknowability of other people, remains as valid now as then.

Christine Dixon