The Private Theatre: Jas Shalimar

The Private Theatre 

An essay by Josephine Mead 

‘The Private Theatre’—a new series of works on paper by Jas Shalimar—presents self-portraits that reference Carl Jung’s twelve archetypes—representations of basic human motivations, desires and fears. They are: the Innocent, the Every person, the Hero, the Caregiver, the Explorer, the Rebel, the Lover, the Creator, the Jester, the Sage, the Magician and the Ruler. Drawn from live tableaux vivants that are photographed by her partner, Giulia, the resultant paintings lean into the porosity of these sorts of divisions. Shalimar considers gender, sexuality, memory and object to find, lose and transform the self.

While fantastical in appearance, these images are also highly orchestrated. Shalimar works like a set designer, fashioning backdrops and props to present uniquely designed scenes. Garments are often the precursor, informing the inclusion of other elements within these constructed tableaux vivants. ‘The Private Theatre’ as project, began with the jester costume for ‘A Tenderness and a Tension’ (2024). This became the basis for an initial self-portrait that led Shalimar to explore Jung’s archetypes in their entirety. What followed—watercolour realisations of each of the twelve archetypes—did not echo the immediacy of this first translation. As Shalimar attempted to find herself within each archetype, the boundaries between them became blurred. In trying to construct one archetype, she would find that she had instead created a representation of another. Shalimar explains, “I keep thinking about how porous the boundaries are between the different archetypes. This is what separates it from theory.” There is always a separation between theory and the true physical, emotional, embodied self. These are not fixed identities. While some of the works bare the titles of the archetypes, others have elusive titles, encouraging the reader to work out for themselves which archetype they are looking at.

The archetypes have been used as a tool to not produce a taxonomy of the self or identity, but rather act as a, “seed or starting point.” Shalimar explains, “they are both reflective of me and are able to stand in for other bodies. I have gravitated more to some and have been confronted through trying to link myself to others.” The archetype becomes a starting point to construct, while allowing for elusive becomings. At the core of the work sits a deeper questioning of categorisations such as gender and sexuality. Through Shalimar, Jung’s archetypes become questions, used to reckon with her queerness and sense of self-positioning. To be queer is to be porous. 

‘Peering Through the Keyhole in Your Own Head’ (2026) centres on the performative nature of gender—in particular the performativity that can accompany ideas of femininity. Shalimar draws on long hair and black patent heels—tropes of “femininity” that abound in cinematic culture, to consider her own experiences of feeling pressured to meet assumed standards and codes of how femininity is expected and perceived. Her queerness is a force that drives her away from this stereotypical figuring. 

Akin to much of the work, ‘The House is Awake’ (2026) references the house Shalimar grew up in. Likening her father’s artistic impulses to her own, Shalimar explains, “I grew up in a house Dad built. He’s been constructing the house since I was little. It’s become a “set” for my life. Dad would go to demolition sites and bring home architraves and windows and doors. This affected my artistic sensibilities. I began to see parts of the house as independent from their context … as objects unto themselves.” Echoing the objects her father has collected overtime and the function of home as a force which yields identity, Shalimar holds a cast iron frame in front of her face. 

‘The Magician’ (2025) extends this familial storytelling. Shalimar is pictured reaching out to a chair suspended in space and existing in part outside of the drawing’s frame. As a child, her father suspended this chair in their house, up high and out of reach of little hands. It became a sculptural device, losing its utilitarian objecthood. The chair has become a repeated symbol throughout this series and across Shalimar’s wider practice—a trope through which to envision the “magic” of everyday life.

Shalimar relishes her “tiny things collection.” Since childhood she has collected small talismans. They all meet a “private criteria” in her head and act as seeds for ideas or relationships within the work. She creatively returns to these small objects when she needs to solve problems. They are still seen through the lens of childhood with a sense of innocence necessary for tapping into creative play. In ‘Wisdom Teeth’ (2025) she lies in foetal position, surrounded by a selection of these objects.

The garments worn throughout the self-portraits have been collected over years. They exist somewhere between clothing, object and artwork, and form an imaginal wardrobe. Some are from Shalimar’s wardrobe; some are hired costume. A large red skirt, loosely based on vulvas, adorns Shalimar in ‘The Ruler’ (2026). This work was where paradoxes and contradictions started to appear. The viewer may ask if this is in fact a manifestation of the Ruler, or a representation of the Lover. Likewise, it could be the Explorer. Shalimar explains, “the work sits in ambiguity.” Shalimar’s archetypes resist to be fixed, inhabiting imaginative realms. Wearing a playful costume she made for ‘Winged Reverie’ (2026)—butterfly wings adorned with the words, “worlds within”—she meditates on the “freedom of imagination.” 

For ‘The Spectre She Carries Inside Her’ (2026) she stands looking through an open window frame, attached to a curtain with an image of a door exposed upon it. The work speaks of care, grief and loss. She could be looking back to memories or seeing her own reflection. The function of the window is unclear. Is it mirror or portal? These deeply considered works on paper continue to return to the temporality of family memory. Her mother, when looking at the fabric in this particular work, was reminded of her adolescence. Now thinking towards future works, Shalimar has been ruminating on a recent dream her father had—where he found himself walking down by a river, reaching in, and finding all of the clothes he had ever given away. This can be seen as an allegory for how we retrieve and are never far from memory, with the ability to shift memory into new form. This is also an allegory for the way Shalimar is fashioning these worlds.

‘Ianthe’ (2026) came about through a series of “synchronistic chances.” As Shalimar notes, “the seeds of the work do sometimes come from being attracted to the materiality of it. The title was taken from the name of the fabric pictured.” Ianthe means violet in Greek. Upon further research Shalimar found its deep associations to queerness—through the Greek myth of Iphis and Ianthe and the writings of Sappho. Thinking through the strength of intergenerational queer community, and a reflection on a personal lack of queer elders in her life, this work functions as a portrait of strength and hope. Strength built through the experience of being in a queer body and hope for a future built on the foundation of this. Curiously she has chosen to wear her overalls in this work—garb she wears in the studio and that is most representative of herself—an outfit she feels at home in. With care, Shalimar tends to the chair—appearing to be placing it gently down or perhaps attempting to lift it up. Shalimar is readying for the role of future elder.

Continuing to explore lineage, ‘Their Songs, Their Thirsts’ (2026) speaks to ancestry and inherited story. It implies the thought that we “carry the songs of those before us” and celebrates our existence as a sum of past individuals. Shalimar holds her belly— a symbol of life force and creative intuition—while intentionally not a symbol of pregnancy, the gesture is used to represent makings to come.

‘The Story You Tell Yourself’ (2024) draws loosely on the tale of Joan of Arc, without overly sinking into the aestheticization of it. A balance of contrasts, the white cloth held in hand could be a symbol of peace—a white flag to drop—or a white version of the Capote de Brega—the cloth that instigates the start of a bull fight. 

Further responding to binaries, 'Something Feels Familiar' (2026) deconstructs the trope of a suit—a garment often associated with men—to break down societally enforced divisions of what constitutes “masculine” and “feminine”. It’s hard to locate this iteration of Shalimar. The traditional codes of the suit begin to slip with the contrast of the stockings. Shalimar remarks, “it’s an image that surfaces from somewhere half remembered.” 

Through an openness to the porosity of the self, the pluralities of queer experiences, and with abounding creative curiosity, Shalimar finds herself as multi-faceted artist, unable to be fixed.

—Josephine Mead, 2026

Jas Shalimar is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist working across drawing, painting, and object-based practice. Employing figurative composition and evocative imagery, her work explores desire, identity, personal mythology, and the construction of meaning through storytelling.

Working intuitively across material and image, motifs such as chairs, hands, windows, and fabric begin to recur, forming a kind of alternate lexicon. This visual language constructs lyrical narratives that weave together the personal and the archetypal. Playing with costume and adornment, this intuitive logic moves towards the body, examining how identity is collected, constructed, and performed.

Growing up in a house built by her father, where chairs hung from the ceiling and secret passageways threaded through the house. Jas has developed an enduring sensitivity to the symbolic potential of objects, spaces, and the imaginative possibilities embedded in everyday life.

Jas graduated with a BFA (Honours) from RMIT in 2019. Her debut solo exhibition, Something Feels Familiar: Memorialising the Everyday, was presented in 2023 at Meat Market Melbourne. She has been celebrated as a finalist in a range of prizes, including the National Emerging Art Prize (2024), Gosford Art Prize (2025), and Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2026). In 2025, she was one of the three recipients of the Centre for Contemporary Photography x Metro-Auto-Photo commission at RMIT Gallery.