In ‘Doubtful Amulets,’ Rebecca Suares-Jury brings together flowers, textiles, memories and art historical references in paintings that resist fixed meaning. Drawing on her mixed Indian and Australian heritage, the paintings become places where cultural histories intersect, where personal and inherited histories meet without settling into fixed identities. Rather than offering stable symbols, these works allow meaning to shift through contradiction and exchange. The exhibition’s title takes a phrase from Joan Didion's essay ‘On Self-Respect,’ where “doubtful amulets” describes the fragile beliefs and symbols to which we attach certainty.
Drawing on family gardens, textiles collected in India, Dutch still lifes from a book inherited from her grandmother, 1970s Australian gardening books and the decorative patterns of everyday domestic life, Suares-Jury's paintings move between the personal, the art historical and between the cultural traditions that inform her practice, without privileging one over the other. Monumental flowers emerge through bold colour and gestural brushwork, transforming a motif often dismissed as decorative into one of vitality, resilience and presence. Rather resolving these influences into a single visual language, these varied references are brought together without collapsing their differences, allowing unexpected relationships and new meanings to emerge.
Without seeking definitive answers, ‘Doubtful Amulets’ proposes doubt as a form of openness. The paintings suggest that meaning is not secured through certainty, but continually shaped through memory, encounter, and the willingness to be changed while remaining oneself.
