Replicating the elongated paper cones of Goya’s witches (a reference to the humiliating coroza headwear assigned to 18th-century Spanish heretics), what we today view as a shiny party hat no longer seems like fun. Here, the nostalgic childhood game of dress-ups slips into something menacing. Yet beneath this disquiet, a dark, almost primal beauty endures. Hastings’ extraordinarily controlled handling of oil paint lends these improbable scenes an unnerving physical credibility, highlighting her deep engagement with the uncanny; that peculiar threshold where the intimately recognisable becomes profoundly strange.
Meet the artist and celebrate with us at the exhibition opening party on
Saturday 19 September 1 - 3pm
Light refreshments provided. We look forward to seeing you there.
RSVP appreciated to assistant@flg.com.au
Artist Statement
'In making this series of paintings, I was interested in reclaiming an imaginative mindset, less concerned with preconceived meaning and technical mastery than has characterised my practice to date. To this end, I have cultivated a mode of creation that responds to subconscious cues and illogical creative impulses—gestures that resist rationality, convention and the constraints of technique. The outcome is a suite of paintings filled with absurd and ambiguous imagery that resists obvious interpretation, prompting more questions than answers.
Whilst I think of this as inhabiting a childlike state, these are not ‘childish’ pursuits, but are loaded with adult ‘knowing’ and accumulated experience. Through this approach, the act of painting has become a phenomenological experience in which, for a time, I can step outside the so-called rational world—a world increasingly encountered through a digital lens. Painting becomes, for me, a balm and an antidote to the constant presence of devices, platforms and algorithmic feeds.
Witches’ Flight riffs off Goya’s painting of the same name. Goya was an artist working at a time when the Enlightenment was bringing logic, reason and the order of science to the fore. His painting satirises those he perceived as trapped by superstition and the unquestioning authority of religion. As a contemporary human whose life is mediated, controlled and surveilled by the digital gaze, I contemplate this painting in the context of the godlike powers we have ceded to tech lords and the infiltration of AI as a stand-in for human creativity. This new series becomes a way for me to reclaim the possibility of the impossible—the irrational, the fantastical, the unknowable—and to return to a place of pre-tech wonder and awe.
My paintings reveal another, ‘other’ place, grounded in reality and yet not quite. A place where disembodied hands hover in gloomy corners and tiny eyes peer from interior spaces. Where strange-limbed figures—and the absence of figures—linger, suspended by flimsy sewing pins and string. Where the colour pink, suggestive of the sweetly feminine, lures the unsuspecting into the dark, shadowy corners of the subconscious mind.
- Rebecca Hastings, 2026
Witches' Flight Exhibition Essay by Kate McAuley
Rebecca Hastings has long been a conjurer of the uncanny, but it’s with this latest body of work that she’s allowed herself to fully embrace the mysteries of her process. Entitled Witches’ Flight, it’s here that figure, form and object give way to something much less tangible.
Although the collection borrows its title from Francisco Goya's 1798 painting Vuelo de Brujas (Witches’ Flight), Hastings isn’t revisiting the Spanish artist’s narrative, nor his satirical embrace of superstition during the era of Enlightenment. Instead she is responding to something more elusive - its atmosphere. Riffing off the original, the artist explores how ordinary objects can carry inexplicable weight and how familiar spaces can carry their own mysteries depending on who’s looking.
Everything within these works is recognizable, yet somehow each object slips its leash: oversized sunglasses that hide the subject from the viewer, shielding us from fully understanding her intent; a golden cone hat brimmed with turquoise pins stretches impossibly towards the ceiling; and knitting needles are held away from the figure in the shape of an X as if to ward off an unknown evil.
It is this that places this body of work firmly within the tradition of the uncanny, where, according to Freud, strangeness occurs by magnifying the familiar. There is also an element of childlike wonder and tender-aged malevolence in these paintings - a nostalgia for youth before screens, when hours were spent playing dress-up with whatever our small hands could find, turning the everyday into something that no longer has an easy explanation.
This sense of uncertainty isn’t just the subject of these paintings - it also mirrors a distinct evolution in Hastings’ practice. Where previously she would begin a painting with a relatively clear idea of its outcome, for Witches’ Flight she has allowed her intuition to replace certainty - a relinquishing of control and a leaning in to the enigma of what and where the works themselves want to go.
It’s a surrender that has opened the door to a new visual language for Hastings. While her talent for the precise remains on show, she’s also introduced looser, gestural marks that give the works contrast, oscillating the viewer between observation and invention. The result occupies new territory, where memory and dreams begin to overlap with reality.
Perhaps this is what makes Hastings something of a sorceress herself. Not in Goya’s sense, but in the way artists have always practiced a quieter kind of magic - morphing the ordinary into something charged with possibility. These paintings refuse to resolve themselves into neat allegories or fixed meanings. Instead, they invite us to linger in that delicious moment before certainty returns, when the familiar still feels wonderfully, inexplicably strange.
