Wollert, Victoria January 26, 2026 by ScribblyJoe is an arresting and confrontational work that collapses national celebration into national crisis. Against a violently saturated field of pinks, reds and acid yellows, a woman’s face emerges—fragmented, obscured, glitched. The date in the title is inescapable. January 26th, commonly framed as a day of unity and festivity, is re-situated here as a site of mourning and indictment. The artist’s statement—“Already 6 women have been murdered in Australia in 2026”—anchors the image in lived reality, refusing abstraction. This is not metaphor alone; it is statistical, immediate, and ongoing. The visual language borrows from digital distortion: horizontal bands slice through the figure, mimicking corrupted data or interrupted transmission. The woman’s face is partially masked by angular planes, as though she is being erased in real time. The glitch aesthetic functions as more than stylistic choice; it symbolises systemic breakdown. The nation’s celebratory narrative fractures under the weight of gendered violence. The bright pink backdrop—often coded as playful or feminine—becomes oppressive, almost suffocating. It is a field that both highlights and entraps the subject. Significantly, the recurring presence of red, yellow and black intensifies the work’s political charge. These colours, strongly associated with Aboriginal identity and resistance, operate here as a stark reminder of the enduring trauma inflicted through British colonisation. Rather than appearing as a stable emblem of sovereignty, the colours are disrupted—glitched, smeared, fractured—suggesting a legacy of dispossession and hopelessness imposed upon Indigenous Australians. The red bleeds through the composition like both earth and blood; the yellow flickers as a distorted sun; the black forms a shadowed ground that threatens to engulf the figure. In this context, January 26th is not neutral. It marks the beginning of invasion and the long arc of violence that continues to reverberate, particularly against First Nations women who are disproportionately affected by gendered harm. Wollert’s compositional strategy foregrounds silencing. The figure’s mouth is subdued, her gaze diverted. A white, blade-like form arcs near her shoulder, suggestive of both weapon and void. The layering of textures—spray, digital artefact, painterly abrasion—creates a sense of accumulated harm. Nothing is clean. Nothing is resolved. The woman appears simultaneously monumental and vulnerable, her form dissolving into abstraction at the edges. This instability echoes the precarity suggested by the statistic in the artist’s statement. By situating the work on January 26th, Wollert invokes broader debates about national identity and collective memory. The painting implicitly asks: what does it mean to celebrate a nation while women are being killed within it? What does celebration mean on a date that signifies invasion and intergenerational trauma for Indigenous communities? The dissonance is deliberate. The celebratory palette becomes accusatory; colour is weaponised. Rather than offering a consoling image of resilience, Wollert presents disruption. The work does not aestheticise violence but instead critiques the conditions—colonial, patriarchal and systemic—that allow it to persist. Importantly, the anonymity of the figure universalises the subject without diminishing the specificity of the crisis. She stands in for the six women already lost in 2026, and for those at risk, while also gesturing toward the compounded vulnerability experienced by Indigenous women in Australia. The glitch becomes a visual metaphor for how stories of violence are often reduced to fleeting headlines—momentarily visible before being scrolled past. Wollert resists that erasure by monumentalising the moment. January 26th, 2026 is therefore both memorial and protest. It compels viewers to reconcile the rhetoric of national pride with the reality of femicide and the unresolved violence of colonisation. Through fragmentation, distortion and a charged palette of red, yellow and black, Wollert constructs an image that is difficult to sit with—and that discomfort is precisely the point. The work insists that celebration without accountability is hollow, and that remembrance must be active, not symbolic.

- Critical Analysis by ChatGPT Feb 2026