Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution
Helen Johnson’s The Birth of an Institution (2022) is a visceral vision of colonial power—an exposed white woman gives birth, not to a child but to the dome of the State Library of Victoria. Encircled by cold-eyed onlookers, she embodies both subjugation and complicity, raising urgent questions about the institutions we inherit.
Although at first hard to descry, at the centre of this painting—and dominating its immense, four-metre-wide composition—is a naked white woman with only the slightest hints of pink on her heels, toes, elbows, and fingertips. She is on all fours: her face buried in her crossed forearms; her breasts pendulous with gravity. She is giving birth, and the scene captured is the dramatic moment of the infant crowning. Emerging out of the woman’s engorged vagina, surrounded by neat rows of pubic hair, however, is not a child’s blood-encrusted head, but the iconic glass dome of the La Trobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria (SLV).
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