Tara Denny: HORROR VACUI

TARA DENNY — HORROR VACUI

22 August – 12 September 2026 at SYRUP, 20 Farr Street, Marrickville. Thursday – Saturday, 11am–4pm. (SYRUP 020. Concurrent with Huseyin Sami's PAINTERIAM.)

For her inaugural SYRUP exhibition Tara Denny presents a body of work exploring the archives of Edith Agnes Harrington, an in-patient turned artist at Beechworth's Mayday Hills psychiatric unit in the mid-20th century.

Informed by historical documents and archives housed at the Dax Centre, University of Melbourne and the Collections at Museums Victoria, Denny celebrates the queer-micro figure Edith Agnes Harrington, intertwining Harrington's historical experience with her own lived experience of psychiatric disorder.

Horror Vacui creates a conversation at the intersection of neurodivergence, medical misogyny and hysteria through the vernacular of crafts and textiles. Translating to 'a fear of empty spaces', Horror Vacui explores the myth of the 'mad woman in the attic' — offering a vision of embodied trauma and grief, and the healing that can follow.

BIO

Tara Denny's practice uses her own lived experiences as a gateway to narrate historical lineages of women's resistance that might otherwise be subject to erasure. Taking the term mad(ness) as a default, Denny delves into the canon of archetypal female lunaticism found in literature, culture and activism, exploring the 'mad woman' and her plural manifestations in current and past social contexts. Denny's mad woman is descending from the attic and is ready to converse with the patriarchal structures of power that have held her in a frozen state of play.