BEAUTIFULLY TANGLED Rachel South 31 Aug - 6 Sep 2026
BEAUTIFULLY TANGLED “Hair is everything. We wish it wasn’t so we could actually think about something else occasionally, but it is.” Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, Series 2, Episode 5, 2016 to 2019
This quote, now in the pop culture canon, has become something of an obsession for me. It repositions hair not just as decoration but as a total infrastructure of gendered anxiety, a site where desire, control and identity are fought out strand by strand. Hair, as subject, has become my everything. I stand before my easel, surrounded by reconstructed, hyperrealistic, luxurious, coloured strands of synthetic hair, attempting to reconstruct that algorithmic gaze. The gruelling physical act of painting and studio urgency consume me. Canvases have become a vital battleground against the screen, the real and the manipulated. Two ideas keep circling this body of work. The uncanny: that flicker of recognition and repulsion when the almost human tips into the not quite. The plastic sublime: beauty manufactured at a scale and smoothness no hand could match. Somewhere between the wig and the wound is where this hair lives. I am deeply obsessed with mutating hyperreal AI-generated hair, distorting the
machined perfection, translating the impossible into luscious pigments and glazes in the act of painting. What strikes me most is the cinematic glow — a synthetic glaze designed to commodify desire. When you are pulled into that intimacy, you expose the uncanny gestation of a plastic sublime, the algorithm birthing a monstrous synthetic reality, arousal collapsing into the absurd. And yet the human hand insists. Paint resists intention where the algorithm resolves. It opens where the image perfects. It cannot be controlled the way the digital can. Paint remembers the body that made it: the pressure, the hesitation, the obsessive return. The surface talks back. Painting these by hand, stroke by stroke, I chase what was never meant to be caught. The paintings expose the false and unattainable, the image the algorithm promised but could never deliver, and the algorithmic bias that demands a hyper-idealised standard of femininity. Digital consumption, manipulation, and reality are now so entangled that most of us can no longer tell what’s real. By contrast, these tightly composed close-ups feel more real than reality. The synthetic feels more desirable than the actual, or more human than human. This series of paintings lives in that entanglement, beautifully tangled between the hand and the machine, something neither could have made alone. Rachel South
Left: Iced Sage 2026 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 cm $1,200 Right: Verdigris 2026 Acrylic on canvas 50.5 x 50.5 cm $800
Silk Threads, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 50.5 x 50.5 cm, $800
Woven Threads, 2026, Acrylic o
on canvas, 50.5 x 50.5 cm, $800
Saffron Glow, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 50.5 x 50.5 cm, $800
Maple Syrup 2026 Acrylic on canvas 122 x 91 cm $2,600
Molten Honeyed Mustard 2026 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 cm $1,200
Spun Sugar, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 cm, $1,200
Dune, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 101.5 x 76 cm, $2,400
Midnight Resin, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 75 x 75 cm. $1,800
Blackened Plum, 2026, Acrylic o
on canvas, 122 x 122 cm, $3,200
Blush Ribbon, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 101.5 x 76 cm, $2,400
Left: Sun-kissed Chestnut 2026 Acrylic on canvas 101.5 x 75 cm $2,400 Right: Ephemeral Currents 2026 Acrylic on canvas 122 x 122 cm $3,200
Umberveil, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 152.5 x 122 cm, $4,800
Beautifully Tangled is supported through the Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF), a partnership between the Queensland Government and the City of Moreton Bay to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland. With thanks to Kellie O’Dempsey for her mentorship throughout the development of this exhibition.
Rachel South Website: https://rachelsouthart.com Instagram: @rachel_south_art
ArtSpace @Jan Manton Gallery 54 Vernon Terrace, Teneriffe QLD 4005 info@janmantonart.com janmantonart.com 0419 657 768