SWOOPING IN
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Gracia’s written response to Caroline Meaden’s Immacolata, especially for Fjord Review.
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In the Chunky Move Studios, for Caroline Meaden’s Immacolata, presented as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival, two banks of seats, on the diagonal, hold a room. To one side, a clothes rack with a singular silk robe, and a small stool. On the far wall, three paintings, gently illuminated. They depict three views of a yellow chair. A chair piled high with rumpled fabric. A chair for clothes. Worn clothes, perhaps to be worn again. Or clothes washed, heaped, and calling to be folded. It doesn’t really matter which way you might interpret this, for the clothes-chair is a symbol. To the person sat behind me on a high stool, perhaps the clothes reminded them of warm clothes out of the tumble dryer that are never going to make their way to a wardrobe because their life is spinning out of control. To the person before me, perhaps the pile was representative of a different kind of spiral, when you feel overwhelmed and chores mount up, because, really: why bother? The loaded chair is a loaded inkblot. It is whatever you read it to be. As the synopsis hints, the chair concealed beneath a pile of discarded clothes in the corner of the room “obscures any semblance of formal clarity.”[i]
As Meaden looked at the chair of her and her partner’s clothes as they “steadily piled up” she began to draw the tumbled still-life before her “in all the little misshapen teardrops, circles and triangles.” The forms, to Meaden, “assembled into grotesque and ungainly tumours—born out of the chair itself.”
[i] Caroline Meaden, Immacolata synopsis, Melbourne Fringe Festival, https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/immacolata, accessed 3rd October, 2026.
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15th of October, 2026
Caroline Meaden in Immacolate by Caroline Meaden (image credit: Jeff Busby)
