Can we use the talking cure to solve society’s ‘problem’ with women?

Natalya Hughes’ The Interior invites audiences into an exaggerated consultation room, playfully furnished for psychoanalysis. The immersive installation—combining sculptural seating, richly patterned soft furnishings, and uncanny objets d’art, nestled around a hand-painted mural—generates a stimulating space to unpack our collective and unconscious biases.

Interested in the role of women and their historical absence from positions of power, Hughes’ part-professional, part-domestic setting plays with gendered power dynamics between public and private space. The bespoke couches that dot the gallery take their lush contours from the shapes of the female body, while motifs of eyes, rats, and snakes from Freud’s patient case studies ripple over their detailed upholstery.

Audiences are invited to recline and be enveloped, soothed and held, by the furniture’s womanly forms, while taking turns playing analyst and patient. Throughout this bodily encounter, The Interior offers a space where women can be reimagined on different terms in a post–Me Too world.