Thinking Through Pink

By Brian Kelly

There’s something special about the colour pink. Roses, lollies … elephants? Then there are the idioms it colours. It’s assigned to stereotypes, politics. Think pink long enough and you can see what Miley Cyrus meant when she said it was not just a hue but an attitude.

Pink is the sole focus of a new exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery – and it seems curator Dr Sally Gray is something of a repeat offender in that space. “In the Realm of the Lotus exhibition at Wollongong in 2003, we painted the gallery walls pink, and, of course, the lotus itself is mainly in a beautiful range of shades of pink.

“Colour has always been a part of my creativity one way or another, whether it’s the way I dress, I paint and decorate my homes, or artists I chose to work with,” she says.

For Dr Gray, the Thinking Through Pink exhibition draws from an “intersection of gender, sexual politics and visual culture”; it aims to invite viewers to dive into the colour, “to swim about in its ambience, to breathe in its pleasures”.

There is much to breathe in. The colour has done its share of heavy-lifting over millennia, being associated with frivolity, queerness, femininity, popular culture and kitsch. Then there were the news headlines four years ago exalting it as the “world’s oldest” colour, having been discovered in rocks 1.1 billion years old.

The exhibition includes works from the gallery’s own collection, the Powerhouse collection, posters from second-wave feminist artists Jan Fieldsend and Marie McMahon, and works from artists Dr Gray invited for the event.

As the arts emerge from the pandemic, Dr Gray says: “We need to see the arts as a national good … Creative thinking is necessary for all urban and regional life, for individual well-being and the survival of the planet. It’s that important.”