Seeing Double: Julie Rrap Stands on Her Own Two Shoulders in a New Free Exhibition at the MCA

Artist Julie Rrap is standing next to a new life-sized sculpture of herself – two selves, in fact; one is standing on the shoulders of the other. “I always say the great thing about making art is that you can do impossible things. So I can stand on my own shoulders as an artist,” she tells Broadsheet, smiling.

Rrap’s new bronze work – two naked women, posed in a forward motion like athletes – greets visitors at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in the new exhibition Julie Rrap: Past Continuous. It’s a show about “how time moves through our bodies”, says the artist. “Being in my seventies, I have a lot to look back on.”

The celebrated Australian artist isn’t presenting a survey of her work (she’s done that already at the MCA), instead curator Lucy Latella has invited Rrap to revisit her debut exhibition from 1982 – Disclosures: A Photographic Construct – and create a dialogue with her current self.

“My body is now 42 years older, and creates a very interesting perspective from which to reflect on the body through time,” says Rrap. “In contrast, the ageing female body is virtually invisible within representational history and popular culture.”

Rrap’s bronze sculpture, SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders), took a year to make. The casting process required the artist to be still for up to two hours at a time. “You couldn’t possibly be cast in one piece. You wouldn’t survive it,” she explains. It’s reminiscent of all the classical sculptures you see at galleries and museums around the world – almost always made by men.

“It’s also quite playful,” Rrap says. “I wanted to make sure the figure standing on my shoulders has a certain vulnerability to it, and I feel like it has achieved that.”

Rrap’s sculptures of her 70-year-old frame are an act of defiance, both against who is memorialised and against predominantly youthful depictions of the female nude body in Western art history. When SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders) leaves the MCA, it’ll go to the Art Gallery of Western Australia as a permanent sculpture. “I love the idea that she’ll be outside with [sculptures by] people like Rodin,” says Rrap.

Across the room, a multichannel video projection shows Rrap frenetically drawing around her naked body with charcoal. We’re seeing the perspective of three Go-Pro cameras strapped to the artist’s body, throwing the viewer around like we’re watching a live-action POV in a sports broadcast. Drawn In, as it’s called, references life-drawing classes – but with Rrap in the driver’s seat she’s both the model and the artist, the subject and the voyeur.

“Bodies are always controversial – they can be seen as beautiful, ugly, grotesque – and there’s such a long history of that,” says Rrap. “The gaze, and men dominating the depiction of women, is wrapped up in it, but it’s also cultural. In that way it’s always topical.”

Another striking video work is Mirror Talk in which the artist has taken a self portrait from her 1982 exhibition and paired it with a colour image of her face now. Both are animated, moving in sync with the words appearing below it – an extract from Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror. “I made 26 different expressions of my face and [they’re] connected each to a letter of the alphabet, so what you’re watching is my face moving with every letter that’s typed.”

Next to it is Rrap’s recollection, written across the gallery wall, of tripping on magic mushrooms aged 18. At the time she saw a reflection of an older self in the mirror. “True story,” she says.

And the work that sparked the idea for this exhibition, Disclosures: A Photographic Construct (1982), hangs in a space tucked away from the newer works. Seventy photographs taken in Rrap’s studio at the time are suspended so visitors can walk around them, like a self-portrait maze. Some photos show the artist’s naked body, others show the bedroom studio from the artist’s perspective. “I was being very intuitive,” says Rrap, reflecting on how she felt at the time.

“You always get a little tense before a show opens and [recently] I thought ‘Why do I make the work I make?’ It’s so interesting that just using a body in any way is something that people will have a view on, for or against. It’s such a classical topic in art – probably the most classical – the use of the body.”

Julie Rrap: Past Continuous is on at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia from June 28 to February 16, 2025. Free entry.

mca.com.au