Jedda-Daisy Culley’s latest body of work is a lucid expression of internalised fears. Expanding on her multidisciplinary practice, which centres the complex realities of female experience, Culley splays open feminist ideas of sex, intimacy, motherhood and objectification. Blurring the line between figuration and abstraction, the corporeal and ethereal, the metaphysical portraits and dreamscapes summon personal memories, conversations and anxieties about female experience. Exhibited in Parallel Parallel alongside works by Kym Ellery at Saint Anne Gallery in Paris, Culley renews her focus on painting as she brandishes her flaws with swirling, heartfelt gestures, challenging underlying tensions between society and its relationship with ‘difficult’ women in a feast of chaos and explosive colour.

Over the course of her career, Culley has developed a recognisable visual language. Early works evoked vibrant textures of the natural world and evolved to depict the female body as its own landscape: a resilient vessel of creation, pushing forward new life while bearing witness to the throes in between. In the aftermath of a near-death experience, when Culley and her two children almost drowned in the flooding of the Colo River in 2021, she drew from the dichotomies between mother and monster archetypes, motivating her interest in what is often at odds. “For centuries women have been deemed otherworldly monsters to keep them frightened of the powers they may or may not possess,” tells Culley, “I want to embrace the darker side of the female experience, the beastliness of her soul and learn to tap into anger as a potent source of empowerment.” Compositions began to depict representational figures (aliens, insect-like creatures, illusive cowboys) and spiritual symbols (sprites and archangels), charged with personal associations, meanings and narratives from the artist’s real life. By using these phantasmal tropes, Culley allows her lived experiences to shape-shift into beings that are as ambiguous and contradictory as womanhood itself.

In Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal text, The Second Sex (1949), the author ruptures the idealised concept of the ‘Eternal Feminine’ and idealised perceptions of femininity that had attempted to control and define how women should be and behave. In her riposte, she conjures the pluralities of what it is to be a woman, giving language to the ambiguity that so often suffuses and defines female experience: “She is an idol, a servant, source of life, power of darkness; she is the elementary silence of truth, she is sacrifice, gossip and lies; she is the medicine woman and witch; she is man’s prey; she is his downfall, she is everything he is not and wants to have, his negation and his raison d’être.” These ever present tensions within female experience are what guides Culley’s practice to intimate places, where fear, rage and passion intersect.

Wielding her ponytail brush like a sword or a lasso at the ready, Culley encircles personal memories and collective feelings, coaxing them forward into loose, unbridled forms that spill across canvas. Charged with multitudes of emotion, each work represents a sum of all of the artist’s parts: mental, physical, spiritual. Obliterating and resurrecting them through paint, the exhibition pulses with adrenaline, a feverish urgency that feels immediate and close to the surface.

The exhibition begins with her series Watch me drop this tight skin to the floor and explode, see me erupting, bubbling, shedding, lactating. It soothes your soul to know how mangled she is at the core (2024). The trio of works depicts crouching figures in various states of becoming unbodied: limbs twist and flail, breasts multiply and implode, phallic forms are thrust out and swinging. Their toothy mouths are wide with fury, skins are being shed, the layers are coming off. There is a deep feminine truth that resonates within this series: the universal desire to scream into the void.

In contrast, the first work Culley made for the show is a small self-portrait, Give us a kiss on the lips (2024), which she painted after reflecting on an unwanted advance she encountered as a teenager with a prominent male figure in the arts. While the work also shows her mouth hanging open, imprinted with a red dollar sign, it’s not yet enraged; rather, it is docile, confused, as if a doctor has said ‘Say AH!’ before trapping her tongue for a general oral check-up. “When women express an anger powerful enough to move the story, they’re almost immediately demonised,” explains Culley, “I no longer want to contribute to the greater silencing. I can’t bear the shame of it. But the web of deception is systematic, men bury secrets to protect each other. Though I’ll no longer let it be implied that rage is an irrational emotion for women.” This piece stands as an infant precursor and manifesto to the trials and tribulations of being a woman and the ideas that Culley would later become aware of, navigate and endure.

Amongst her signature characters emerge the borderless bodies of new psychological life forms, dubbed ‘fear fairies’. Culley imagines them as manifestations of her anxiety, which she once caged and locked inside of herself but are now writ large: menacing, agitated, and bursting with energy. Babe, you’re on fire with green edged flames, this healing feeling burns (2024) depicts a fear fairy hovering in flight, its beating wings outstretched in a melting pot of vivid hues. Giving way to a monstrous form erupting from within, from its centre swarms a beastly gaze, illuminating other possible faces within the same frame (her wings, head, the sky). Yet there is also a soothing fluidity about this creature, an elemental calm that comes with being set free. Through her, we can better understand our many changeable parts and the nature of the multifaceted feminine.

Reconciling compositions that toe the line between disorder and euphoria, Culley attempts to find peace between conflicting realms, simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of the task at hand. By tearing open, breaking down and reaching for the truest parts of herself, she ultimately connects her stories with others—parallel, parallel.