Swooping In

In the Chunky Move Studios, for Caroline Meaden’s “Immacolata,” presented as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival, two banks of seats, on the diagonal, hold a room. To one side, a clothes rack with a singular silk robe, and a small stool. On the far wall, three paintings, gently illuminated. They depict three views of a yellow chair. A chair piled high with rumpled fabric. A chair for clothes. Worn clothes, perhaps to be worn again. Or clothes washed, heaped, and calling to be folded. It doesn’t really matter which way you might interpret this, for the clothes-chair is a symbol. To the person sat behind me on a high stool, perhaps the clothes reminded them of warm clothes out of the tumble dryer that are never going to make their way to a wardrobe because their life is spinning out of control. To the person before me, perhaps the pile was representative of a different kind of spiral, when you feel overwhelmed and chores mount up, because, really: why bother? The loaded chair is a loaded inkblot. It is whatever you read it to be. As the synopsis hints, the chair concealed beneath a pile of discarded clothes in the corner of the room “obscures any semblance of formal clarity.”[1]

Performance

Caroline Meaden: “Immacolata”

Place

Melbourne Fringe Festival, Chunky Move Studios, Melbourne, October 3, 2026

Words

Gracia Haby

Caroline Meaden's “Immacolata.” Photograph by Jeff Busby

As Meaden looked at the chair of her and her partner’s clothes as they “steadily piled up” she began to draw the tumbled still-life before her “in all the little misshapen teardrops, circles and triangles.” The forms, to Meaden, “assembled into grotesque and ungainly tumours—born out of the chair itself.”

Meaden’s paintings have a presence to them. They are fluid shapeshifters. They are forlorn folds, promises, and past lives, shed skins. They are characterful. Colourful and domestic. Personal, and though the pile conceals the chair, they are revealing. A mound of multiple meanings. They are a soft sack of potatoes. They assume a singular form, when viewed at night, a lumpy, hungry chair, an elephant in the room. What might be germinating within the heap, what might be buried beneath? In the personal setting, comprised from little, they hint at the unspoken.

On the closing night of Meaden’s “Immacolata,” the name also which Meaden and her partner call the saddled chair, there is an air of ‘something has happened’. Something is being lived, felt, and processed. There is a feeling of grief. It hangs unseen in the air, but it is there. It has settled on the clothes mound. It has settled on the furniture dotted about the room. Even on the temporarily arranged seating for the audience. And while the audience might not know what has transpired, there is no mistaking the aura in the room. In not labelling what has happened, I am free to lay my own meaning on the work. To perhaps add my own crumpled garment to the yellow chair. To see caution in the movements of the body that hint at injury or illness or sadness or uncertainty or feelings of worth. “Immacolata” is deeply personal, but there is a generosity in how this is slowly revealing itself. And in that space of generosity, I can think about illness and grief and expectations of the body to perform a certain way. As Meaden lets her right arm dangle from the shoulder socket, her arm circles as if independent of the remainder of her body. Not just physically independent, but as if operating in response to commands not from her brain, but from some other control centre. Governed by grief. Steered by wariness. Navigated by absence. Perhaps to the person sat beside me, they saw a personal struggle within their own form as they watched this scene. Perhaps they read this lack of control as a hallmark of illness. A body that refuses to yield to the wishes of the brain and instead operates under a new set of rules. Limbs go wobbly, and steadiness is not a given.

Caroline Meaden's “Immacolata.” Photograph by Jeff Busby

Bird calls fill the space. And this outside brought inside seems to make perfect sense, for the outside song renders the space enormous. Enormous and empty. There is a huge cavity, or perhaps you might see it as a void or a canyon or a gaping hole. In the freedom to interpret, the gulf was vast and endless like the sky world of the birds. As Meaden loosens herself from a gown fastened at the back by packing-tape tabs, which recall a hospital gown, she is laying herself bare. Small crumbs fall, here and there. A trail to follow or recognise in the unravelling. At the furthest point, standing alongside the painting of the chair viewed in profile, Meaden mirrors the positioning with her own limbs. Then, at the closest point to the audience, she repeatedly rolls her forearms in a churning motion. Rarely does she occupy the central space.

In a work which has changed shape as it was and is being made, “Immacolata” began life beneath the mantle “Dare” before growing into “Bear,” which morphed into “Broadcast.” It has been explored and supported as part of a Lucy Guerin Moving Forward Residency in 2025 and has been shifting ever since.[2] Like the three different views of the same chair, painted in her bedroom earlier this year, it will perhaps always be so. Especially given the highly personal nature of the work. It is something that can never settle in one fixed shape.

Meaden sheds another layer, and small tears are visible in the armpits of her blouse. As this is cthe last night, I am unsure if they were the result of the performance, or if they’ve always been there, worn through a longer process. As Meaden in a collapsed heap on the floor waits, inert, exhausted, crumpled like the discarded clothes, something (literally, now) draws near. The robe on the rack (by the aid of a small fishing line) is being drawn towards her, as if she were a magnet. I did not notice the silky robe had been loosened from the hanger until it was halfway across the room. It rolls in like a shadow. Ominous. Inevitable. Unavoidable. Path determined. It speaks of things which occur that are beyond your control. It is the lump of organs you become when you enter a hospital and sign your trust over. It is the shape recovery takes. Or the trauma beforehand. A sick robe for a sick body. A cloak as a hug. A wardrobe indicator that signals your stasis as the rest of the world spins at a rapid rate, leaving you behind. A symbol of something impossible to shake off.

Upon the back of the flowing robe, a beautiful scene is painted. A view from a room looking out. The window is arched, the effect near romantic, like the intimacy of a Pierre Bonnard interior, who, too, placed emotional currency in domestic scenes, from bathtub to veranda. Three birds rest on a ledge. The robe is perhaps sometimes a hug. With her back to the audience, atop the low stool, Meaden sits. Her body motionless, as if hollowed out and of stone; illness and sorrow bear a uniform. Later, as she makes her form a small stone in shape, not just stillness, she buries her entirety beneath the robe. Perhaps to disappear. Perhaps in pleading for the pain to desist.

At the conclusion of the performance, audience members are handed reflection to read, titled Three Birds (An essay for reading after “Immacolata”). In the essay, without revealing too much to those who have yet to see the work, Meaden writes of a magpie swooping her, and I am reminded of how male magpies will swoop those who come too near their nest. They are protecting their young, their family. She writes of watching a blush of pink-headed galahs playing and wishing they’d animate her and fly into her chest, sparking an intensity of feeling: “I want them to fly into me—I want to be involved in something this important.”[3] Watching birds be birds, being alive and curious, is both restorative and reveals how far you can slip from the realm of the living when grieving. The disconnect feels insurmountable. Whether as a symbol or noting the stark contrast between the joie de vivre of the birds and the unasked-for mountain still to climb, renewal feels as though it might be an inch closer.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

Caroline Meaden, “Immacolata” synopsis, Melbourne Fringe Festival, https://www.melbournefringe.com.au/whats-on/events/immacolata, accessed October 3, 2026.
“In keeping with the fluid title, the work has morphed and shifted according to the conditions within which it was forged.” ‘Residency Reflection: Caroline Meaden’, Moving Forward Residency, May 7, 2026, Lucy Guerin website, https://lucyguerininc.com/news/residency-reflection-caroline-meaden, accessed October 3, 2026.
Caroline Meaden, Three Birds (An essay for reading after “Immacolata”), September, 2026.

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