“Why are you hiding your face?” Asks 2022 Archibald prize winning artist, Blak Douglas, referring to Giddy up, Kim Leutwyler’s self-portrait, hung in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery New South Wales, 2022.

“I think I look hot,” replies artist and subject.  

I agree, whilst tipping her cowboy hat, acquired when she went to the central dessert to make a queer cowboy film with her friend, Kim Leutwyler does indeed look ‘hot’. Although, I posit, that this performative gesture is double sided, the tipped hat both reveals and withholds. The title, Giddy up, is equally double edged, both an admonition to hurry up from the horse racing world and a sexy invitation. Giddy Up, the painting, navigates aesthetics on one hand through the lens of queerness and the politics of representation, and on the other through a painterly engagement with the application and material qualities of oil paint.  

In 2022, Kim was a finalist in the Archibald Prize, with a double portrait of Australian drag artist, singer, television personality and author, Courtney, and Shane. In the same year, she was also a finalist in the Sulman Prize with her self-portrait, Giddy Up. The Sulman Prize, is one of the trio of annual art prizes that are all hung at the same time at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The Archibald prize is awarded for best portrait, The Wynne, for best landscape or figurative sculpture and the Sulman is awarded for best subject, genre or mural painting. According to this year’s artist judge Joan Ross, the defining feature of the Sulman Prize is narrative. Giddy Up, holds narrative both within and beyond its frame, it is both playful and sassy in subject matter, and clearly political, contributing to the democratisation of space for the representation of kink communities by being hung in the state’s most prestigious, public art gallery.

In this self-portrait, which is a blend of expertly handled realism and abstraction, Kim chooses to pose wearing the accoutrements of Kink culture: black leather harness, tasselled bra, and holding a sex rope. As part of her ongoing artistic exploration of the evolving aesthetics of queer identified people and their allies, the black shapes of the kink gear operate as both a signifier of the kink community and as an aesthetic foil to the pop art, candy-coloured realism, and drippy, gestural abstraction. Kim’s body is rendered symbiotically with the passages of abstraction in the painting with the boundary between background and subject far less discrete than we expect. Her skin which we understand as a barrier between the inside and outside, a container within which our ‘selves’ exist is disrupted and revealed as enmeshed with and made up of, the same ‘stuff’ as its surroundings. We all know that skin is permeable, a layer through which osmosis continually occurs, exchanging the outside for the inside and vice versa, just as smells and sounds, visions and haptic experiences enter and impact on our bodies, so too does what’s occurring inside disperse outwards into the environment, materially, psychically, and metaphorically. The world imprints itself on us and we imprint our-selves on the world in a constant state of receptivity and reciprocity. This painting makes clear – the materiality of the world is the materiality of our selves.

Donna J. Harraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says in her book ‘Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene‘, It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…

In choosing how to explore what came to matter to me about Kim Leutwyler’s painting, Giddy Up, I am using what mattered to me when reading Aimee Bender’s magical realist novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake as a device to diffract and interrogate my thinking. The protagonist in Bender’s novel, Rose, can taste the feelings of the people who make the food she eats. The novel opens with Rose’s mother making a birthday cake for Rose’s ninth birthday.  As Rose puts the cake in her mouth, she describes the ingredients to us, sugar, lemon, butter, chocolate, then the feelings of the maker unfurl, drift upwards and open themselves to her. She recounts the taste in her mother’s lemon cake as a taste ‘of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset, and more.’ It makes eating food fraught and exhausting for Rose as she consumes the feelings of the maker, not at an intellectual distance but as an intimate, embodied, and unavoidable encounter with the raw emotional world of the maker. Bender’s novel is a wondrous, sensitively drawn work, where the boundaries between object and subject are completely dissolved. As the novel unfolds, we discover that Rose’s brother Joseph, can disappear inside furniture, a skill he hones, until he can do it for days and then weeks. As the novel draws to a close, we understand he wants to permanently remove himself from his human body and stay inside the furniture.  Rose mitigates the imminent loss of her brother’s human form, by asking him, when he makes his final decision to leave his body for good, to promise to disappear into his favourite chair. The bittersweet and loving gesture of that request is that she doesn’t ask him not to go where he wants, she simply requests a signpost, so she knows where he is when she can no longer see his body.

The way Bender explores how we experience the transference of emotion through material objects pushes the reciprocity of the exchange into a situation where the boundaries between human and non-human disappear. In Bender’s novel, everything exits on the same plane, object and subject are indistinguishable, there is no transcendence, no better than, no other than, there is no above and below, no asymmetrical power relationships, no human exceptionalism. We are all conduits for the other, both physically and materially – reciprocity is the central concept – intuitively and graphically explored throughout the novel. If Rose’s brother can disappear into and be the chair – then there is no line between human and object. If Rose can taste the feelings of whoever produces the food she eats, then there is no defining line between the way a human carries emotion and the quality of emotion food is able to communicate. I don’t mean evoke, I mean hold within itself so that as the food enters Rose’s mouth she gets the full weight, in detailed specificity of unexpressed emotion direct from the maker. It is not a new idea that objects can communicate emotions, that they hold the trace of the life they have been involved in – think of family heirlooms, jewellery of the deceased, sites of trauma. The way Bender describes material exchanges between object and person, is deeply visceral, moving away from notions of nostalgia, memory, and metaphor to embodied, lived physical exchanges, experienced highly legibly and directly, where the object itself has agency and contributes to the articulated and enmeshed qualities of the encounter.

Bender’s magical realist novel resonated for me when encountering and contemplating Giddy Up. The painting dances between a core materiality where the qualities and properties of oil paint are paramount, and the evocative, narrative aspects of the painting which rely on the painterly illusion of realism as the transcription of the real. Our encounter is with the object-hood of the painting, which seduces us with its mix of realism, pop art colours and gestural abstraction, punctuated by the black kink gear. The painting explores both the materiality of paint and the politics of representation, it is both a scaffold and an armature and a poetic re-imagining of the limits of the body and the limits of our imaginings.

By elevating the role, her gestural abstract marks play within the painted body, Kim encourages us to read the painted body as in some ways other than or more than its representation. For me, the abstract gestures with their immediacy and lack of artifice, are more directly intimate than the realism which I read and understand to be more controlled – purposefully fitting within a taxonomy of representation. Body, hat, bra, breasts are all easily named and owned within a linguistic system with its attendant cultural history of signification and enmeshment with narratives of power and subjugation. The abstract gestures are less easy to name, less easily described, less easy to fit into a rationalist world view. The conflation of realism and gestural abstraction within the representation of the body disrupts the encounter with the subject. The subject is no longer static, instead there is a constant push and pull between the realness of the paint and the representation of the subject, the imagined and the expressionistic, where legibility is constantly re-negotiated. In painting herself in kink gear and getting this painting hung in the Sulman prize, the painting plays an important advocacy role for the members of kink communities. To be represented is to carve out space both within society and within the social imaginary – both dynamic and contested, evolving spaces of potential and repression.

In August 2022, Kim was the invited guest, as part of Live at the Lounge, a weekly program of talks and activities in the Members Lounge at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. For this program, Kim was in conversation with the Art Gallery’s Curator of Australian Art, the thoughtful and intelligently playful, Anne Ryan. During the conversation both curator and artist embodied and enacted a generosity of spirit drawing the audience into an inviting and generative encounter with art, ideas and each other. Throughout the talk Kim, celebrated other artists and friend’s achievements even though as the invited speaker she was the reason we were all there. Indeed, Kim drew the entire audience into her warm, exuberant embrace, holding the room, much like Giddy Up, held the wall in the 2022, Sulman Prize – in an open, reciprocal gesture of being-with.

I read a powerful duality in this work, an exquisitely political tension between this self-confessed extrovert and relaxed exhibitionist and the withholding of her identity through the carefully poised cowboy hat. A gesture drawn from the vernacular language of tipping one’s hat in greeting and a gesture that mask one’s identity as it covers part of one’s face. How much we reveal of ourselves publicly is always a navigation. What is lost and what is gained by ‘going public’ about details of one’s identity continues to be nuanced, politically and socially and remains consequential territory. I see representation, agency, vulnerability, pleasure, and fun, as all central to Giddy up.

Giddy up could be an admonishment from the artist to society. An admonishment to catch up with the artist’s exuberant, yet deeply political acknowledgment and acceptance of queer identified women’s right to express themselves in ways that are true to their sense of self. I read Giddy Up as a provocation to remember that bodies and their representation are matters that matter. I invite everyone that reads this essay to consider how and with what means they think about and express what’s important to them. A provocation that, when considering important matters – bring a sense of timeliness and urgency to their material expression.

To circle back to the words of Donna Harraway, It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…

In the words of Kim Leutwyler:

Giddy up…