Opening Friday Sept 5, 5-7pm, all welcome.
In Forbidden Fruits, Tanja McMillan (Misery) presents a new body of work that continues her exploration of femininity, fantasy, and the subversive undercurrents of pop culture. Through a series of watercolours and canvas works, McMillan conjures a world where sweetness and danger coexist—where wide-eyed girls, hybrid creatures, and surreal landscapes invite the viewer into a deceptively playful, often unsettling universe.
Long known for her distinct visual language—part kawaii, part punk, and deeply rooted in street art—McMillan’s new collection embraces softness without surrendering edge. Her use of watercolour introduces a delicate materiality, with fluid washes and layered transparency offering a counterbalance to the graphic punch of her canvas works. Across both mediums, recurring motifs of fruit, temptation, and masked desire play out in coded narratives that echo personal mythologies and cultural critique.
Forbidden Fruits draws on the artist’s ongoing interest in identity, performance, and the tensions between innocence and agency. This is Misery’s world—bright, strange, and charged with symbolic depth. Beneath the sugar-coated surfaces lies a more complex terrain, where beauty is weaponised, vulnerability is power, and nothing is ever quite what it seems.
