Isabella Gullifer-Laurie
About
Writing
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Recent Selected Work
The economical production of Be Pretty and Shut Up! is delightfully rebellious, for despite the poor lighting and imperfect sound quality it is atmospherically resplendent, luxuriating in scenes of relaxed conversation and spontaneous cogitation. Jane Fonda is sprawled on a bed; Juliet Berto flops on a couch, boot-shod feet tucked underneath her; Viva reclines against a wall, eyes raised in mischievous contemplation. These women are at home, dressed in loose shirts, smoking and chatting. The telephone rings, their children are screaming. Slumped, diffident, disappointed; alive to the contradictions that make their professional lives possible. Spiritual weariness and professional strain are leveraged and reformulated to afford collaborative, conversational joy. These women are fulsome and funny in their answers, acerbic and angry. Read more >>>
Antigone Kefala’s Fiction | 2025
Kefala’s women are not dramatic. They are poised, observant, hungry in body and mind for freedom, beauty, authority. Restlessly they must remake themselves, constructing a sympathy between what they have abandoned and what they can now abide. Her sentences can be crisp and scrupulous, images sharpened to a point. At other times, her prose is like a riddle, closer to a sensuous dream-work, all photographic blur and spill. Reading across this collection one can recognise the shifts in Kefala’s style, her steady maintenance of a language that guards and gives generously. Her peculiar vision is both austere and lyrical, elegantly fluent in the secret ways of the self. Read more >>>
Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John | 2024
Celia Paul is filmed painting in her studio. Standing with her narrow back to the camera, she drags a bristle brush loaded with smoke-coloured paint across a small canvas on an easel. A thin grey ground has already been applied to it. She then dips the brush in a pot of turps and cleans it with a stained towel draped around her shoulders. She spends a great deal of time doing this, and all the while continues to look at her painting. The side of her face is visible, and thin puce lips twist into either a grimace or a wry smile. The effect is like that of watching a dog burying a bone, lodging a secret underneath the earth. Aside from her outstretched arm, she is, however, almost totally still. Read more >>>
Lauren Aimee Curtis’s Strangers at the Port | 2024
Strangers at the Port is suffused with a political consciousness—its interest lies in how one might go about telling, and how authority is inscribed at every level of explanation ... Curtis is conscious of how the conditions of outsiderliness are constructed—national borders, geographic boundaries, language, appearance, forms of dress, the thresholds between childhood and adulthood, the hard line between material comfort and deprivation. Her compositional approach intends to unsettle, her characters are marked by their sense of loss, and being lost. Read more >>>
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow | 2024
Behind the camera, it is as if the narrator cannot be seen; it furnishes her with a place to hide. This mode of perception is an orchestrating one, whereby the narrator can exercise her control through the framing power of a lens. Yet this gesture is also replicated in the narrative style itself, as the impersonal texture of Au’s prose offers the narrator a form of protection. This is a text which renders language with a soft and smoothing touch, shyly and also slyly. For despite the narrator’s humble glance—always looking out, and around—she maintains a narrative voice that invites authority with one hand whilst seeming to give it away with the other. The narrator is also self-conscious of her manner of speech: as if “applying a kind of firm but gentle pressure”. She appears to abdicate the fictive pact that begins with the use of “I,” straying away from proximity, favoring distance. This is not quite a feint at narratorial impersonality, although Au seems enamored of the cooling effect of such a voice. Rather, this textural choice implicates a desire to hew something smooth from what was once rough or uneven. There is an understanding, then, that prose style is a careful mediator of personality. If the text exhibits the narrator’s toil, the deft but difficult work of saying something just so, it arrives at a style through a deliberating effort that conceals its own labor. Read more >>>
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit | 2024
Saint Phalle appropriates her sculptures as stage props and scenery, and her illustrated letters and drawings are employed in title cards and animated sequences, each marked by her distinct, curvaceous scrawl. Rapturous, raucously joyful, childishly naive, yes. But these recurring figures of Saint Phalle’s dreamhouses also suggest despair, rage, shame, guilt: suited men slain with swords, the tempting serpent, the monster scaled in green, the many-tongued golem, the devouring mother split in two during birth. Enormous sculptures dominate the dream world ... It seems as if Camélia has entered the dark guts of Hon – all turning cogs and flying sparks – trailing her skirts through black steel slicked with grease. This is the machine of adult dreams and desires. In Saint Phalle’s hands, the engine is not just a source of energy, a symbol of vitality; it is a hallucination motor, a site of psychoactive dysregulation. Read more >>>
Criticism, Reviews,
Essays, Interviews
Essays, Interviews
Book review of Antigone Kefala’s Fiction / The Saturday Paper
Book review of Beverley Farmer’s The Seal Woman / The Saturday Paper
‘Her Own Witness’ — a review of Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul / Sydney Review of Books
‘The Voyage Out’ — a review of Strangers at the Port by Lauren Aimee Curtis / Meanjin
Book review of Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons / The Saturday Paper
Book review of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow / Chicago Review
Film review of Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror / Roughcut
Book review of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium / The Saturday Paper
Interview with Audrey Lam on Us and the Night / MIFF + Kill Your Darlings
Feature on Niki de Saint Phalle’s Un rêve plus long que la nuit / MIFF
‘Into the hedges that line the walk’ — a review of A Horse at Night by Amina Cain / Meanjin
Book review of Anna Kate Blair’s The Modern / The Saturday Paper
‘The long and the short of it’ — a review of Wall by Jen Craig / Overland
‘Contiguity’ — a review of Theory of Colours by Bella Li / Meanjin