Showing at the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s Backspace Gallery, local artist, apprentice tattooist and theatre set producer Chrissy Button draws upon her Polish heritage in Daughters of Baba Yaga, artworks inspired by folklore and the feminine. In Eastern European folklore, Baba Yaga is a monstrous old woman – she is the witch. In common tropes involving this character, she commands her transfigured herd of 41 daughter-horses to foil the hero-prince (a task which proves as treacherous as it is impossible). Accordingly, she beats them and accuses them of disloyalty and self-interest.

Button responds to the fairy tale’s patriarchal symbolism that serves to monsterise the matriarch. Her sculpture and collages feature the red thread that not only deflects the evil eye according to Polish superstition but also acts as a bind for repair, control and manipulation.