Artist: Georgia Spain

Tolarno Galleries presents Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Georgia Spain’s new exhibition of paintings and watercolours, Everything everyone’s told you is true.

Created while she was pregnant with her son, Spain’s new works are an embodied visual diary writ large, chronicling a period she calls “a state of becoming – turning from one thing into another”.

“I did a deep-dive into some of my favourite women artists, many of whom were mothers who made work about pregnancy, birth and motherhood,” says Spain. “So I was constantly drawing from this lineage of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero and Camille Henrot in making this body of work.”

Spain’s freely expressive and richly chromatic paintings detail specific moments in Spain’s pregnancy while gesturing towards broader ideas around nurture, care and the maternal body. Animated by bursts of flushed colour and fleet figural contours, they give vigorous form to the hopes and anxieties Spain experienced while carrying her son.

At the very beginning, Spain wasn’t sure she even wanted to paint about her pregnancy. “But as I got bigger I thought, how could I not make work about being pregnant? It’s such a huge thing, and that’s how I process what’s going in in my life. If there’s a major event, I’ll want to make work about it.”

Switching from oils to acrylics, Spain began work on multiple canvases simultaneously, placing them on the floor of her warehouse studio and moving between them in an intuitive fashion.

“From the outset I was thinking of them as a family, as a whole,” she says. “I began by pouring washy layers of colour onto each canvas, smearing and smudging the colour around. As I did so I came to really enjoy the drips and the wateriness of the acrylic paint, which felt connected to carrying a new life inside of me, sustained in its own little sac of fluid.”

When Spain became less physically able to paint with the canvases on the floor, she moved them up onto the wall.

“The paintings were made at a certain pace – I love the immediacy, even urgency, of working with acrylic paint,” she says. “Because it dries so fast, it calls for decisive action, and the presence of the drawn line is a reflection of that.”

Several paintings represent the act of childbirth, including I open my mouth so wide (after L.B.) 2026, which references a drawing by Louise Bourgeois. “For me, this one’s about that idea of speaking something real and worthwhile into the world,” says Spain.

The largest painting in the exhibition shares its name with its title: Everything everyone’s told you is true 2026. “I’m thinking about my future as a caregiver,” explains Spain. “I’m picturing multiple selves in different timelines.”

Another painting, Prospection 2026, “is about the journey of parenthood that lies ahead,” says Spain. “The little drips on the right of the painting could be either milk or tears. You come to realise, you’re not just having a baby, you’re having a person. Everyone keeps telling us, ‘Treasure those precious moments when they’re young, because it won’t last.’”

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a well-meaning friend’s words of advice for Spain and her partner. “He said, ‘Everything everyone’s told you is true. It’s terrible. It’s wonderful. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. It’s the best thing you’ll ever do. It’s everything at once.’ And that phrase just stuck with me.”

Accompanying the paintings is a suite of nine framed watercolours on paper, selected from a larger collection of works Spain created for a forthcoming artist’s book, Watercolours (Person Books). Limited to an edition of 100 copies, the publication features a hand-painted cover and includes a poetic response to Spain’s watercolours by poet Dominic Symes.

“Even though I made these watercolours prior to the large paintings, they feel part of the same body of work in their shared visual language and themes of bodies in flux, transformation and connection,” says Spain. “In a way, the paintings are almost like blown-up versions of these works.”

If there’s a secret ingredient to Spain’s paintings and watercolours, it is optimism.

“So many women artists who came before me had kids and a career,” says Spain. “It’s possible. And guess what – motherhood is a subject worth making art about. Through the process of creating these works, I want to honour the legacy of those female artists whose path I’m following.”