Underneath the house at the end of Collace Street in Brunswick is Peep Show, a local artist-run space. Founded in February 2025 and run by Olivia Wood, Darcy Guttridge, Luca Feldman, and Tomas Ording-Jespersen, it has firmly established itself as a site for independent, experimental projects. Entering through the roller door behind the house, there is the familiar layout of a suburban Melbourne backyard, animated by people attending the opening night of Walking Around Herself—sitting around the rotary clothesline, scattered across the asphalt, standing on the garden bed.

“Upstairs, a party!” Harriet Jones, curator of Walking Around Herself, declares in her exhibition text for the show featuring Claire Lambe and Nica Nervegna-Reed. She goes on to write: “They rumble the floorboards. They’d like to crack through.” Jones’s text reads like a personified narration from the perspective of the space itself, which is buried halfway below ground level and accessible only by ducking through a hole in the wall. The sound of a bouncy guitar and Andean pan flute melody, thin and wind-like, wafts from the space, giving the show an immediately jovial mood. Entering the buried room, the first work in view is Nervegna-Reed’s Hollow Log (2026), a black spiralling rubber totem sprawled across the floor, glitched halfway through its form with its organic shape suddenly giving way to something more rigid and turbulent. To the right, facing me, a sleek cabled speaker plays the Andean tune next to a box television playing Nervegna-Reed’s video Coucou! (2024), where I can make out a cartoon impression of a deer. Behind it, Claire Lambe’s Keeping Ripe Fruit Away from Eve (2026) is positioned in a way that provides a supporting backdrop to the television, with a steel frame of nested poles extending upwards to a narrow landing, where black oilskin sacks in the shape of decaying bananas run along its frame. Like a dark steel tree, more banana-like forms hang from short rungs jutting out from a railing attached to the landing.

My initial impression is of a jaunty twilight jungle party. These dark objects seem like shadows of something else. The hanging fruit appears like a landscape in the distance, while the television set plays an upbeat track to dance to. It is a parody, I think. Something mocking. Of what? I am not sure. Maybe it is because the Andean jungle is very far away from us, and thereby something we can only understand abstractly, or through premature stereotypes. I am distracted from this train of thought by a friend who has entered, and we get to talking. We take a seat on a ledge within the space, and, after some time, cannot ignore that it is the same song, the same bouncy guitar and pan flute melody playing over again. “It feels sad,” my friend says. We look back over the space, becoming more aware of a scorched atmosphere created by these dark solitary sculptures, intensified by the mockingly contrasted music.

I am looking closer at Nervegna-Reed’s video work: it is actually footage of a ceramic deer, frozen in a coy posture, its large head and frail body resembling something of a Disney cartoon character’s anatomy. It is laterally cropped within about a third of the television screen. The deer in the clip is enclosed within four clear walls; light gleams off air bubbles in its transparent pen as the camera slowly pans and shifts around it. The deer sits inside its transparent enclosure, inside the cropped frame of the television, inside the bunker beneath the house, boxed in a Sony CRT monitor—its isolation compounding with each layer.

The scene reminds me somewhat of the work of Cosima von Bonin. The ceramic deer recalls Bambi (1942), echoing the cartoon and mythic characters that sometimes populate von Bonin’s installations. The limp sacks of rotting bananas similarly carry something of her cynical yet playful stuffed-animal sculptures: soft forms that appear humorous at first, and then faintly abject upon further consideration. It is this slowly uncoiling abjection that the conceptual forces of Walking Around Herself seem to be stirring within.

We leave the space and rejoin the party above: conversation, laughter, drinking, smoking. In her exhibition text, Jones quotes Camille Paglia—“society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature”—a line casting a more ominous light across the buried room. Faintly, beneath the noise, the pan flute continues to drift up through the hole in the wall—“a smothered urge,” Jones writes, “churning.” What had first seemed playful now feels insistent, even bleak. I find it increasingly difficult to focus on the conversation in front of me, drawn instead to the trace of sound and to the sense of dissonance it carries up from the space below.

The looped song is Vera Baxter, composed by Carlos d’Alessio for Marguerite Duras’s 1977 film Baxter, Vera Baxter. In the film, the score ceaselessly recurs throughout, erupting and falling in gusts of wind throughout its hour-and-a-half runtime. Within an isolated glass house that borders on a forest, a portrait of Vera Baxter—an affectless bourgeois woman—is revealed through the visits of two women who coax her out of silence. Through these conversations, presented theatrically in different rooms of the bare house, the source of Baxter’s despondency gradually surfaces. The soundtrack continues to loop like a carousel, mocking and contrasting her lethargy.

Early in the film, Baxter is introduced in a series of static, carefully composed shots that recall the conventions of a traditional nude portrait: her shirt open, pearls at her neck, her gaze averted. As the camera slowly shifts, these images evoke the panning lens of Coucou!, producing a shared sense of distance and containment. In both cases, the viewer looks through a transparent barrier, positioned as a detached observer. This dynamic recalls Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), where glass operates to expose the feminine form while preserving its distance, organising an antagonistic system of gender positioning. The enclosure—whether vitrined, screened, or caged—becomes a useful metaphor for how gendered identities are constructed through acts of objectification, staging femininity as both displayed and immobilised.

Read alongside Vera Baxter, Nervegna-Reed’s doe figurine can be imagined on the other side of her glass villa. The figurine appears at once as Baxter’s inverse—a stand-in for the nature from which she is alienated—and as a distorted reflection of her own condition. Rather than forming a clear opposition, the two begin to mirror one another. Baxter’s distance from nature, staged against the polished interior of the villa, does not neutralise so much as reinforce her isolation, amplifying the estrangement that defines her condition. Likewise, the deer—ostensibly a figure of the natural world—now appears carefully arranged and contained, its fragility heightened by its enclosure within the screen. Both figures held in place, suspended between display and inertia.

The figurine’s polished surface and delicate posture begin to resemble an image of femininity staged for viewing. In this sense, Nervegna-Reed’s work complicates the idea of autonomy within inherited gendered narratives. The suggestion of a “freedom out there”—in nature, beyond the social order—is rendered unstable, as that very image of nature appears already mediated, aestheticised, and constrained. Lambe’s Keeping Ripe Fruit Away from Eve extends this instability. The familiar symbolism of ripe fruit is displayed as slumped, decaying bananas, with their soft forms both comic and abject. If the apple once anchored a foundational narrative of temptation and gender, here that symbolism begins to sag and lose coherence, as if the terms through which these identities are organised are themselves starting to break down.

Duras describes Baxter’s passivity and devotion to marriage as a condition in which “it is as if, when she moved, she went around herself, her own body.” Lambe and Nervegna-Reed’s Walking Around Herself seems similarly grounded in a state of suspended agency—a kind of languid acceptance of gendered positioning. The exhibition pushes this condition to a point where even the idea of liberation begins to fracture. Nervegna-Reed’s coiled sculpture, encountered on entry, makes this immediately visible: the spiral falters, no longer flowing but stuttering as if caught in a loop. The endlessly circling pan flute melody, the caged deer, and the cascading sagging bananas all return this same logic of repetition: movement without release.

A further register emerges in Lambe’s mentorship of Nervegna-Reed prior to her graduation. Here, too, distinctions begin to blur: between teacher and student, influence and autonomy. Rather than resolving into a clear hierarchy, these roles appear to fold into one another, recounting the exhibition’s broader concern with repetition and inheritance. The oscillations between playfulness and melancholy, and freedom and constraint, extend beyond the works themselves to encompass the conditions of their production.

My earlier impression of a “jungle party” now reads less as a misreading than as a partial truth. While the exhibition sustains a dense conceptual framework, shaped in part by Duras, its immediate effect remains one of dissonance. The familiar signs of festivity are present but drained of vitality: bananas slumping in oilskin sacks, a cartoon deer immobilised behind glass, a tune looping without resolution. What begins as playful becomes strained, even mechanical. The exhibition hovers around the idea of liberation without ever fully arriving there, presenting images of nature and femininity that feel rehearsed, almost theatrical. The result is an uneasy oscillation between sincerity and parody, where even the language through which liberation is imagined begins to come undone.