Tanja Stark is an Australian artist and writer exploring the themes of Suburban Gothic and the Sublime Divine through mixed media, photography, installation, painting, sculpture, and poetry.
Working with elemental materials such as clay, paperbark, copper, and wood, her imagery draws on archetypal forms centred around the animating forces of fire and energy, electricity and charge, spirals, and organic vessels.
The Spiral Hot Plate Element
Widely recognised for her iconic integration of the Spiral Hot Plate Stove Element as a symbol of charge and alchemic transformation, Stark’s practice delves into the interplay between personal and collective trauma, healing, and creative expression. Her work is deeply informed by spiritual and psychological frameworks, examining how contemporary experiences can be overlaid with mystical, contemplative, and visionary traditions throughout history.
Poetry
The visceral nature of her visual practice is reflected in her poetry. Her piece Sanguino Ergo Sum — is almost a visionary manifesto calling us into the fullness of embodied life and creation a world of virtual realities.
“…Above I gaze where blood moons bleed
like sky stigmata in the hands of God
casting celestial syzygies like cosmic eulogies.
inside, my body swoons,
her red tides dance in tune…”
Sanguino, Ergo Sum by Tanja Stark
Born in North Queensland, she has lived in Mackay, Rockhampton, Cairns, and Papua New Guinea, and now works from a bush studio on the outskirts of Brisbane. She has exhibited in Australia and internationally, graduated from the University of Queensland, and is published on arts, mental health, trauma, and archetypal themes in both ancient and popular culture (famously writing on Jungian influences in the work of musician David Bowie) with Routledge and Bloomsbury Academic Press.
Spiralling Undercurrents, Artist Talk, Melbourne Jung Society 2022
Suburban Gothic and the Sublime Divine
For much of my creative practice I’ve been fascinated by suburban gothic and the sublime divine. my work spiralling around these ideas, nebulous and ever evolving. Transformation, alchemy, synchronicity and grace are powerful themes in my creative life, work, and my spiritual explorations.
My conception of ‘suburban gothic’ has been deeply influenced by intuitive experiences and psychoanalytical ideas of the shadow . The unconscious parts of domestic life and the psyche, beneath conscious awareness…those desires and feelings that have such a powerful influence on waking life, particularly when they constellate around trauma. It is where the ‘shadow’ is not acknowledged or integrated, but is repressed, projected, or inflated that the darkest aspects of ‘suburban gothic’ manifests.
Where European ideas of the ‘gothic’ evoke dark, haunted castles with layers of mystery, processing life as an Australian woman soaked under a southern sun, suburban gothic has become the thematic way I conceptualise the modern, domestic manifestations of ancient anxieties, traumas, and primal fears. A place where the brightest light casts the darkest shadows – of seen and unseen forces, the mysterious, the subterranean, the dark and the haunting that infuse layers of inter-generational trauma with social workers and shrinks, womens refuges and wellness retreats. The cracks before the light gets in.
“I am interested in exploring the shadow side of suburbia that seeps up over renovated decks on gentrified avenues, across freshly laid turf in new estates, out past the mongrel dogs on frayed ropes in working class sprawl. I am intrigued by paradoxical motivations and garden variety neurosis, by physical scars and metaphorical wounds…in the containment of flesh, passion and spirituality in neat domestic packages and therapist’s drawers “
Tanja Stark Artist Catalogue 2002
The Sublime Divine
Yet, in as much as I am fascinated by gothic shadows, my art and my life has been pierced through, and perhaps contained within, the mysterious and transformational forces of the Sublime and the Divine.
It is hard to articulate in words what I mean by this, because for most of us stumbling about this territory this realm is deeply symbolic and experiential, and mystical, transcendent and beyond intellectual understanding.
Traditional notions of the Sublime conjure up images of profound moments that leave our souls simultaneously humbled and ablaze; burning with an exquisite mix of awe and terror through encounters with the forces greater than ourselves; wild storms and raging bushfires, the infinite spiral galaxy of stars above.
It is the realm of Otto’s Numinosum, the metaphysical, sacred, and transcendent dimension, the experience of mystery, fear, awe, beauty and majesty.
The sublime echoes in the energies that pulse around and through us, at the precipices and edges of existence, in encounters with spirit, death and rebirth. As a woman who traverses the psyche of our imitate spaces, the sublime manifests in the moon and her power to move the ocean as she mirrors the rhythms of lifeblood through a woman’s body.
The sublime meets us through fever dreams and visionary experiences, in spinning suburban car crashes and breathtaking orgasms, in the agony and ecstasy of childbirth. It is the light that breaks through after breakdowns, imbuing the shadows of life with alchemic transformations of beauty and meaning beyond ourselves.
The sublime does not negate the gothic, the sublime is transcendent, expanding us, beyond our boundaries of duality into realms that allow us to glimpse the…unknowable.
Sometimes there are no words. There are only symbols.
This is why I create.
NE
The sublime does not negate the gothic, the sublime is transcendent, containing and expanding beyond boundaries of duality into realms that allow us to glimpse the unknowable.
Tanja Stark Artist Catalogue 2011
Contact Tanja Stark email: art.words.ideas@gmail.com
Phone: (Australia) : 0414 658 235
Instagram: tanjastark_artist
...dealings with artists, for instance, require great prudence; they are acquainted with all classes of society, and for that very reason dangerous” KING LEOPOLD OF BELGIUM TO QUEEN VICTORIA 1845
Yearning, I am ravished by a visceral gospel, naked leaving myrrh-soaked shrouds in its bloody wake”
Sanguino Ergo Sum : Tanja Stark 2025
I never know which page to use to say thank you if people have liked my blog – so I just picked this one! Thank you for visiting me.
I have a family full of art students and Bowie fans, so I shall be sharing your blog with them.
Thanks S ! xx
Hey and thanks so much for liking our posts! Much appreesh!
Dear Tanya
I noticed on Facebook today Tony Visconti’s photograph of the Russian dolls you sent him as a present and wondered if these were available to buy at all. I have never bought any Bowie memorability before but saw your Russian dolls and thought they were beautifully designed and crafted. I don’t know whether you do commissions but would be delighted to hear from you if you do and how much the dolls would cost if available.
Hope to hear from you.
Inga Fairweather
HI Inga – I’ll drop you an email.
T
Thank you Tanja I really liked the ones on your website of the album covers when I saw them rather than the ones I saw on facebook.
Inga