Breaking Out of Gaol

Built in 1861, The Lock-Up was a colonial police station and collection of cells. The rooms are mostly cool and dark on a sunny winter’s day in Newcastle, sandstone and iron rubbed back to heritage roughness.

Walls are scratched with names and messages, many inchoate, others legible indicators this old building and its maze of spaces once formed some kind of hide ‘n’ seek shelter for kids who played or slept here in another century.

The building now serves as a gallery space. Sydney artist Wendy Sharpe has moved in for a while, transforming it from now till mid September with a show she calls Into the Dark.

It’s some of the best work she has ever done, all the more powerful and effective for the way she has used the spaces and their shadows. Old stone walls are left bare, paintings sitting in the center of tight, closed cells, a lack of light exploited for mood, as if to frame pictures with shadow alone. Low level prison toilets remind you of former purpose. Sharpe’s intensely female and vaguely self-mythical images offering what starts to coalesce into a journey through her mind and being.

She calls on all her talents and raw materials: paintings; textile works; slide projections; sketch books; decorated lamps and wall objects; a floor painting you’re encouraged to walk across, each step part of a snakes-and-ladders game in the cryptography of her memory.

Colonial themes are subterranean in certain works, scribbled presences in authoritative garb. The children of our technological revolution are painted in black against a burning red smear, a-fire with their addiction. Stick figures and a green face half obscured by blackness and ochre-white swirls imply Awabakal Aboriginal ghosts. Elsewhere demon heads, voluptuous nudes, artist self-portraits afloat or caught in the act of making.

It’s a great show, Wendy Sharpe’s mind-maze of anxiety and artistic energy bringing us the overlap of this colonial place with the radiated presence of revelations coming at us in an apocalyptically communicated world.

Maybe it has always been this way, art and demonology, exorcisms and hauntings, all part and parcel of firelight and shadow-play on a cave wall. Fairytales, too, that tap into our archetypal intuitions and forebodings.

There’s a quote from Bertolt Brecht in a child-like painting of canine beasts eating stick people like us. Sharpe has done this work on a bed-cover doona. The words of her wolfish dream read: “In the dark times there will be singing… Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.”

Sylvia Plath duets with with Brecht, her internal turmoils a mutual song to his political vision: “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”

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Wendy Sharpe’s exhibition Into the Dark runs at The Lock-Up in Newcastle till 17 September 2026