Review: House of Heroines by Lara Schnitger for NGV Triennial

By guest contributor and graduate of architecture Nikita Bhopti

Dutch-American artist Lara Schnitger explores female power and representation through the ages in a new textile installation ‘The House of Heroines’ at the NGV Triennial in Melbourne. Through the use of illustrations, text, fabric and sculptural forms, Lara fills the gallery with a myriad of messages in a powerful culmination of her past works. The resulting exhibition is a welcoming space scattered with moments of joy, humour, familiarity and power. 

With an early love for clothing, Dutch-American artist Lara Schnitger is a self-taught sewer who learned how to make her own clothes as a child, inspired by various stretching, weaving, colour, patterns and techniques. Textiles has always been a place where women come together, whether through knitting groups, quilting groups or weaving communities, instead of creating in solitude. At the NGV’s Triennial, the House of Heroines stands as a fabric temple – a safe space for women that references both contemporary and ancient women’s movements and representations found in architecture and our built environment. 

Entering the exhibit from the bottom corner, a series of four columns span boldly across the centre. Referred to by Lara as ‘The Squad’, these sculptural fabric columns hold up the gallery space in a similar way to the caryatids of ancient Grecian temples, where buildings are held up on the necks of pillars in the shape of women. The forms of ‘The Squad’ are bodily – they have what the artist refers to as ‘fleshy parts’ that are ‘somewhat human’. Yet, they are also abstract and suggestive, embodying a spirit that can be either male or female, a face, a jewel, a skeleton. 

With their impressive sense of scale, the columns draw your eye upward to a sequinned frieze which adorns the exhibit’s four walls. Here, you see etchings referencing some of Schnitger’s previous artworks. Five figures are illustrated carrying ‘Slut Sticks’, sculptural forms that she created for her Suffragette City march in 2016 to challenge beliefs about women’s attire and a culture of patriarchy. We see messages drawn from the annual post-election Women’s March, the whisper network, and the Me Too movement nestled between references to witchcraft, motherhood and femininity. These form a powerful wallpaper of collective women’s movements. 

Taking additional inspiration from the Temple of Hathor, Lara brings us to the goddess of motherhood, love and dance. Both direct and indirect imagery from ancient Egyptian wall drawings are in the mix of illustrations which line the frieze. Above the exhibit’s centrally located door, we see an image of ‘an ovary and a fallopian tube, with a snake in there for fertility’, which is taken from the crypt of the Temple of Hathor. ‘It’s kind of incredible that Egyptians already had that sense of women’s autonomy’, says Schnitger during her NGV conversation with Pip Wallis. ‘I wanted to make the connection to the artwork’. 

With her use of interactive sequinned fabric, Schnitger explores the idea of graffiti acting as a means to share messages in a public space. In her discussion with Pip Wallis, Lara shares how writing ‘Trump is a loser’ or ‘I <3 JS’ on a public toilet wall is an act of personal self-declaration, shared within a safe place. It is a community built by women, for women, within the stalls of public spaces. In Egyptian temples too, ‘there’s so much text actually on the walls’. With a specific focus on hierarchy, Lara has tried to ‘treat all the messages the same’, prioritising no message as more important than the other. 

In a joyful dance between the figurative and abstraction, The House of Heroines is a space that uplifts and celebrates women’s past and present through symbols, words, form and textiles. Held up by ‘The Squad’, Lara’s messages which adorn the friezes artfully balance references to both current and past women’s movements, and their representation across ancient Greek and Egyptian architecture. The exhibit artfully balances symmetry, ornament and scale, and uses fabric materials and techniques that remain largely associated with female labour even today. The resulting space is one that exhibits a strong sense of power and humour at the same time, resonating with both individuals and collectives. It is “a space designed to protect you”, to give you love, support and respect. 

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